





IMPRESSIONS AND 
EXPERIENCES 



ii ' i ii i K i irii i Min i i . i i 



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W. D. H DWELLS 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

Chap. Copyright No. 

Shelf..;..c3r__<S» 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



IMPEES SIGNS AND EXPEEIENCES 






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W. D. HOWELLS 

AUTHOR or "a hazard of nkw fortunes" 
"the quality op mercy" etc. 





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NEW YORK 

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

1896 



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W. D. HO WELLS'S WORKS. 



IN CLOTH BINDING. 



STOPS OF VARIOUS QUILLS. 
Illustrated by Hovvakd Pyi.k. 
%i 60. 

A PAETING AND A MEETING. 
Illustrated. $1 00. 

THE DAY OF THEIR WED- 
DING. $1 55. 

MY LITERARY PASSIONS. 
$1 60. 

A TRAVELER FROM ALTRU- 
RIA. $1 50. 

THE COAST OF BOHEMIA. Il- 
lustrated. $1 60. 

THE WORLD OF CHANCE. 

$1 60. 
THE QUALITY OF MERCY. 

$1 60. 
AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. %\ 00. 

THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 

$100. 
ANNIE KILBURN. $1 60. 



APRIL HOPES. $1 60. 

CRITICISM AND FICTION.Wlth 
Portrait. $1 CO. 

A BOY'S TOWN. Ill'd. $1 26. 

A HAZARD OF NEW FORT- 
UNES. 2 Vols., $2 00. 

MODERN ITALIAN POETS. 
With Portraits. $2 00. 

CHRISTMAS EVERY DAY, and 
Other Stories. Illustrated. $1 25. 

THE MOUSE-TRAP, and Other 
Farces. Illustrated. $1 00. 

MY YEAR IN A LOG CABIN. 
Illustrated. 60 cents. 

A LITTLE SWISS SOJOURN. 
Illustrated. 60 cents. 

FARCES : Five O'CIock Tea.— The 
Mouse-Trap.— A Likely Story.— 
The Unexpected Guests. — Even- 
ing Dress. — A Letter of Introduc- 
tion. — The Albany Depot. — The 
Garroters. Ill'd. 60 cents each. 



PuBLiBHED BY HARPER & BROTIIERS, Nicw Yoek. 



Copyright, 1896, by W. D. Howells. 



Electratyped by J. A, Howells S Co., Jefferson, Ohio. ' 



I 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

THE COTTNTRT PRINTER 1 

POLICE REPORT . 45 

I TALK OF DREAMS 95 

AN EAST-SIDE RAMBLE 127 

-TRIBULATIONS OF A CHEERFDL GIVER 150 

THE CLOSING OF THE HOTEL 189 

GLIMPSES OF CENTRAL PARK 224 

NEW YORK STREETS 245 



IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 



THE COUNTRY PRINTER. 

My earliest memories, or those wliicli I can make 
sure are not the sort of early hearsay that we mistake 
for remembrance later in life, concern a country news- 
paper, or, rather, a country printing-office-. The office 
was in my childish consciousness some years before 
the paper was; the compositors rhythmically swaying 
before their cases of type ; the pressman flinging him- 
self back on the bar that made the impression, with a 
swirl of his long hair; the apprentice rolling the 
forms, and the foreman bending over the imposing- 
stone, were familiar to me when I could not grasp the 
notion of any effect from their labors. In due time I 
came to know all about it, and to understand that 
these activities went to the making of the Whig news- 
paper which my father edited to the confusion of the 
Locofocos, and in the especial interest of Henry Clay ; 
I myself supported this leader so vigorously for the 
A 



2 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

Presidency in my seventli year that it was long before 
I could realize that the election of 1844 had resulted 
in his defeat. My father had already been a printer 
for a good many years, and some time in the early 
thirties he had led a literary forlorn hope, in a West 
Virginian town, with a monthly magazine, which he 
printed himself and edited with the help of his sister. 
As long as he remained in business he remained a 
country editor and a country printer; he began to 
study medicine when he was a young man, but he 
abandoned it for the calling of his life without regret, 
and though with his speculative and inventive temper- 
ament he was tempted to experiment in other things, I 
do not think he would ever have lastingly forsaken his 
newspaper for them. In fact, the art of printing was 
in our blood ; it never brought us great honor or prof- 
it ; and we were always planning and dreaming to get 
out of it, or get it out of us ; but we are all in some 
sort bound up with it still. To me it is now so en- 
deared by the associations of childhood that I cannot 
breathe the familiar odor of types and presses without 
emotion; and I should not be surprised if I found 
myself trying to cast a halo of romance about the old- 
fashioned country office in what I shall have to say 
of it here. 



THE COUNTRY PKINTER. 3 

I. 

Our first newspaper was published in southwestern 
Ohio, but after a series of varying fortunes, which I 
need not dwell upon, we found ourselves in possession 
of an office in the northeastern corner of the State, 
where the prevalent political feeling promised a pros- 
perity to one of my father's anti-slavery opinions 
which he had never yet enjoyed. He had no money, 
but in those days it was an easy matter to get an in- 
terest in a country paper on credit, and we all went 
gladly to work to help hira pay for the share that he 
acquired in one by this means. An office which gave 
a fair enough living, as living was then, could be 
bought for twelve or fifteen hundred dollars ; but this 
was an uncommonly good office, and I suppose the 
half of it which my father took was worth one sum or 
the other. Afterv/ard, within a few months, when it 
was arranged to remove the paper from the village 
where it had always been published to the county-seat, 
a sort of joint-stock company was formed, and the 
value of his moiety increased so much, nominally at 
least, that he Avas nearly ten years paying for it. By 
this time I was long out of the story, but at the be- 
ginning I was very vividly in it, and before the world 
began to call me with that voice which the heart of 



4: IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

youth cannot resist, it was very interesting ; I felt its 
charm then, and now, as I turn back to it, I feel its 
charm again, though it was always a story of steady 
work, if not hard work. 

The county-seat, where it had been judged best to 
transfer the paper lest some other paper of like poli- 
tics should be established there, was a village of only 
six or seven hundred inhabitants. But, as the United 
States Senator who was one of its citizens used to say, 
it was " a place of great political privileges." The 
dauntless man who represented the district in the 
House for twenty years, and who had fought the anti- 
slavery battle from the first, was his fellow-villager, 
and more than compeer in distinction; and besides 
these, there was nearly always a State Senator or 
Representative among us. The county officers, of 
course, lived at the county-seat, and the leading law- 
yers, who were the leading politicians, made their 
homes in the shadow of the court house, where one of 
them was presently elected to preside as Judge of the 
Common Pleas. In politics, the county was already 
overwhelmingly Freesoil, as the forerunner of the Re- 
publican party was then called ; the Whigs had hardly 
gathered themselves together since the defeat of Gen- 
eral Scott for the Presidency ; the Democrats, though 



THE COUNTRY PRINTER. 5 

dominant in state and nation, and faithful to slavery 
at every election, did not greatly outnumber among us 
the zealots called Comeouters, who would not vote at 
all under a constitution recognizing the right of men 
to own men. Our paper was Freesoil, and its field 
was large among that vast majority of the people who 
believed that slavery would finally perish if kept out 
of the territories, and confined to the old Slave States. 
With the removal of the press to the county -seat there 
was a hope that this field could be widened, till every 
Freesoil voter became a subscriber. It did not fall 
out so ; even of those who subscribed in ,the ardor of 
their political sympathies, many never paid ; but our 
list was nevertheless handsomely increased, and num- 
bered fifteen or sixteen hundred. I do not know how 
it may be now, but then most country papers had a 
list of four or five hundred subscribers ; a few had a 
thousand, a very few twelve hundred, and these were 
fairly decimated by delinquents. We were so flown 
with hope that I remember there was serious talk of 
risking the loss of the delinquents on our list by ex- 
acting payment in advance ; but the measure was 
thought too bold, and we compromised by demanding 
two dollars a year for the paper, and taking a dollar 
and a half if paid in advance. Twenty-five years later 



6 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

my brother, who had followed my father in the busi- 
ness, discovered that a man who never meant to pay 
for his paper would as lief owe two dollars as any less 
sum, and he at last risked the loss of the delinquents 
by requiring advance payment ; it was an heroic vent- 
ure, but it was perhaps time to make it. 

The people of the county were mostly farmers, and 
of these nearly all were dairymen. The few manufact- 
ures were on a small scale, except perhaps the making 
of oars, which were shipped all over the world from 
the heart of the primeval forests densely wooding the 
vast levels of the region. The portable steam saw- 
mills dropped down on the borders of the woods have 
long since eaten their way through and through them, 
and devoured every stick of timber in most places, and 
drunk up the watercourses that the woods once kept 
full ; but at that time half the land was in the shadow 
of those mighty poplars and hickories, elms and chest- 
nuts, ashes and hemlocks ; and the meadows that past- 
ured the herds of red cattle were dotted with stumps 
as thick as harvest stubble. Now there are not even 
stumps ; the woods are gone, and the watercourses are 
torrents in spring and beds of dry clay in summer. 
The meadows themselves have vanished, for it has 
been found that the strong yellow soil will produce 



THK COUNTRY PRINTER. 7 

more in grain tlian in milk. There is more money in 
the hands of the farmers there, though there is still so 
little that by any city scale it would seem comically 
little, pathetically little ; but forty years ago there was 
so much less that fifty dollars seldom passed through 
a farmer's hands in a year. Payment was made in 
kind rather than in coin, and every sort of farm prod- 
uce was legal tender at the printing-office. Wood 
was welcome in any quantity, for the huge box-stove 
consumed it with inappeasable voracity, and then did 
not heat the wide, low room which was at once edito- 
rial-room, composing-room, and press-roorn. Perhaps 
this was not so much the fault of the stove as of the 
building. In that cold lake- shore country the people 
dwelt in wooden structures almost as thin and flimsy 
as tents ; and often in the first winter of our sojourn 
the type froze solid with the water which the compos- 
itor put on it when he wished to distribute his case ; 
the inking rollers had to be thawed before they could 
be used on the press ; and if the current of the editor's 
soul had not been the most genial that ever flowed in 
this rough world, it must have been congealed at its 
source. The cases of type had to be placed very near 
the windows so as to get all the light there was, and 
they got all the cold there was, too. From time to, 



8 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

time, the compositor's fingers became so stiff that 
blowing on them would not avail ; he passed the time 
in excursions between his stand and the stove ; in very 
cold weather, he practiced the device of warming his 
whole case of types by the fire, and when it lost heat, 
warming it again. The man at the press- wheel was 
then the enviable man ; those who handled the chill 
damp sheets of paper were no more fortunate than the 
compositors. 

IT. 

The first floor of our ofBce-building was used by a 
sash-and-blind factory ; there was a machine-shop 
somewhere in it, and a mill for sawing out shingles ; 
and it was better fitted to the exercise of these robust 
industries than to the requirements of our more deli- 
cate craft. Later, we had a more comfortable place, 
in a new wooden *' business block," and for several 
years before I left it the office was domiciled in an 
old dwelling-house, which we bought, and which we 
used without much change. It could never have been 
a very luxurious dwelling, and my associations with it 
are of a wintry cold, scarcely less polar than that we 
were inured to elsewhere. In fact, the climate of that 
region is rough and fierce ; and the lake winds have a 
malice sharper than the saltest gales of the North 



THE COUNTRY PRINTER. 9 

Shore of Massachusetts. I know that there were 
lovely summers and lovelier autumns in my time there, 
full of sunsets of a strange, wild, melancholy splen- 
dor, I suppose from some atmospheric influence of the 
lake ; but I think chiefly of the Avinters, so awful to us 
after the mild seasons of southern Ohio ; the frosts of 
ten and twenty below; the village streets and the 
country roads drowned in snow, the consumptives in 
the thin houses, and the " slippin','' as the sleighing 
was called, that lasted from December to April with 
hardly a break. At first our family was housed on a 
farm a little way out, because there was ,no tenement 
to be had in the village, and my father and I used to 
walk to and from the ofiice together in the morning 
and evening. I had taught myself to read Spanish, in 
my passion for Don Quixote, and I was then, at the 
age of fifteen, preparing to write a life of Cervantes. 
This scheme occupied me a good deal in those bleak 
walks, and perhaps it was because my head was so hot 
with it that my feet were always very cold ; but my 
father assured me that they would get warm as soon 
as my boots froze. If I have never yet written that 
life of Cervantes, on the other hand I have never been 
quite able to make it clear to myself why my feet 
should have got warm when my boots froze. 



10 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

IIL 

It may have been only a theory of his ; it may have 
been a joke. He had a great many theories and a 
great many jokes, and together these always kept life 
interesting and sunshiny to him. With his serene 
temperament and his happy doubt of disaster in any 
form, he was singularly well fitted to encounter the 
hardships of a country editor's lot. But for the mo- 
ment, and for what now seems a long time after the 
removal of our paper to the county-seat, these seem to 
have vanished. The printing-office was the centre of 
civic and social interest ; it was frequented by visitors 
at all times, and on publication day it was a scene of 
gayety that looks a little incredible in the retrospect. 
The place was as bare and rude as a printing-office 
seems always to be : the walls were splotched with ink 
and the floor littered with refuse newspapers ; but 
lured by the novelty of the affau', and perhaps at- 
tracted by a natural curiosity to see what manner of 
strange men the printers were, the school-girls and 
young ladies of the village flocked in, and made it like 
a scene of comic opera, with their pretty dresses and 
faces, their eager chatter, and lively energy in folding 
the papers and addressing them to the subscribers, 
while our fellow-citizens of the place, like the bassos 



THE COUNTRY PRINTER. 11 

and barytones and tenors of the cliorus, stood about 
and looted on with faintly sarcastic faces. It would 
not do to think now of what sorrow life and death, 
have since wrought for all those happy young creat- 
ures, but I may recall without too much pathos the 
sensation when some citizen volunteer relaxed from 
his gravity far enough to relieve the regular mercenary 
at the crank of our huge power-press wheel, amid the 
applause of the whole company. 

We were very vain of that press, which replaced 
the hand press hitherto employed in printing the 
paper. This was of the style and make of the hand- 
press which superseded the Ramage press of Frank- 
lin's time ; but it had been decided to signalize our 
new departure by the purchase of a power-press of 
modern contrivance, and of a speed fitted to meet the 
demands of a subscription list which might be indefi- 
nitely extended. A deputation of the leading politi- 
cians accompanied the editor to New York, where he 
went to choose the machine, and where he bought a 
second-hand Adams press of the earliest pattern and 
patent, I do not know, or at this date I would not 
undertake to say, just what principle governed his se- 
lection of this superannuated veteran ; it seems not to 
have been very cheap ; but possibly he had a pre- 



12 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

science of the disabilities whicli were to task his in- 
genuity to the very last days of that press. Certainly 
no man of less gift and skill could have coped with its 
infirmities, and I am sure that he thoroughly enjoyed 
nursing it into such activity as carried it hysterically 
through those far-off publication days. It had obscure 
functional disorders of various kinds, so that it would 
from time to time cease to act, and would have to be 
doctored by the hour before it would go on. There 
was probably some organic trouble, too, for though it 
did not really fall to pieces on our hands, it showed 
itself incapable of profiting by several improvements 
which he invented, and could, no doubt, have success- 
fully applied to the press if its constitution had not 
been undermined. It went with a crank set in a pro- 
digious fly-wheel which revolved at a great rate, till it 
came to the moment of making the impression, when 
the whole mechanism was seized with such a reluctance 
as nothing but an heroic effort at the crank could 
overcome. It finally made so great a draught upon our 
forces that it was decided to substitute steam for mus- 
cle in its operation, and we got a small engine, which 
could fully sympathize with the press in having seen 
better days. I do not know that there was anything 
the matter with the engine itself, but the boiler had 



THE COUNTRY PRINTER. 13 

some peculiarities which might well mystify the casual 
spectator. He could easily have satisfied himself that 
there was no danger of its blowing up, when he saw 
my brother feeding bran or corn-meal into its safety- 
valve, in order to fill up certain seams or fissures in it, 
which caused it to give out at the moments of the 
greatest reluctance in the press. But still, he must 
have had his misgivings of latent danger of some oth- 
er kind, though nothing ever actually happened of a 
hurtful character. To this day, I do not know just 
where those seams or fissures were, but I think they 
were in the boiler-head, and that it was therefore suf- 
fering from a kind of chronic fracture of the skull. 
What is certain is that, somehow, the engine and the 
press did always get us through publication day, and 
not only with safety but often with credit ; so that not 
long ago, when I was at home, and my brother and I 
were looking over an old file of his paper, we found it 
much better printed than either of us expected; as 
well printed, in fact, as if it had been done on an old 
hand-press, instead of the steam power-press which 
it vaunted the use of. The wonder was that, under 
all the disadvantages, the paper was ever printed on 
our steam power-press at all; it was little short of 
miraculous that it was legibly printed, and altogether 



14: IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

unaccountable that sucli impressions as we found in 
that file could come from it. Of course, they were 
not average impressions ; they were the very best out 
of the whole edition, and were as creditable as the 
editorial make-up of the sheet. 

IV. 

On the first page was a poem, which I suppose I 
must have selected, and then a story, filling all the 
rest of the page, which my brother more probably 
chose ; for he had a decided fancy in fiction, and had 
a scrap-book of inexhaustible riches, which he could 
draw upon indefinitely for old personal or family fa- 
vorites. The next page was filled with selections of 
various kinds, and with original matter interesting to 
farmers. Then came a page of advertisements, and 
then the editorial page, where my father had given his 
opinions of the political questions which interested 
him, and which he thought it the duty of the country 
press to discuss, with sometimes essays in the field of 
religion and morals. There was a letter of two col- 
umns from Washington, contributed every week by 
the congressman who represented our district; and 
there was a letter from New York, written by a young- 
lady of the county who was studying art under a mas- 



THE COUNTRY PRINTER. 15 

ter of portraiture then flourishing in the metropolis ; 
if that is not stating it too largely for the renown of 
Thomas Hicks, as we see it in a vanishing perspective. 
The rest of this page, as well as the greater part of the 
next, was filled with general news, clipped from the 
daily papers, and partly condensed from them. There 
was also such local intelligence as offered itself, and 
communications on the affairs of village and county ; 
but the editor did not welcome tidings of new barns 
and abnormal vegetation, or flatter hens to lay eggs of 
unusual size or with unusual frequency by undue pub- 
lic notice. All that order of minute neighborhood 
gossip which now makes the country paper a sort of 
open letter was then unknown. He published mar- 
riages and deaths, and such obituary notices as the 
sorrowing fondness of friends prompted them to send 
him; and he introduced the custom of publishing 
births, after the English fashion, which the people 
took to kindly. 

We had an ambition, even so remotely as that day, 
in the direction of the illustration which has since so 
flourished in the newspapers. Till then we had never 
gone further in the art than to print a jubilant raccoon 
over the news of some Whig victory, or, what was to 
the same purpose, an inverted cockerel in mockery of 



16 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPBKIENCES. 

the beaten Democrats ; but now we rose to the notion 
of illustrated journalism. We published a story with 
a woodcut in it, and we watched to see how that cut 
came out all through the edition with a pride that was 
perhaps too exhaustive ; at any rate, we never tried an- 
other. 

Of course, much of the political writing in the pa- 
per was controversial, and was carried on with editors 
of other opinions elsewhere in the county, for we had 
no rival in our own village. In this, which has always 
been the vice of American journalism, the country 
press was then fully as provincial as the great metro- 
politan journals are now. These may be more piti- 
lessly personal in the conduct of their political 
discussions, and a little more skilled in obloquy and 
insult ; but the bickering went on in the country pa- 
pers quite as idly and foolishly. I fancy nobody 
really cared for our quarrels, and that those who fol- 
lowed them were disgusted when they were more than 
merely wearied. 

The space given to them might better have been 
given even to- original poetry. This was sometimes 
accepted, but was not invited ; though our sixth page 
commonly began with verse of some kind. Then 
came more prose selections, but never at any time 



THE COUNTRY PRINTER. 17 

accounts of inurder or violent crimes, wliicli the editor 
abominated in themselves and believed thoroughly 
corrupting. Advertisements of various kinds filled 
out the sheet, which was simple and quiet in typog- 
raphy, wholly without the hand-bill display which now 
renders nearly all newspapers repulsive to the eye. I 
am rather proud, in my quality of printer, that this 
was the style which I established ; and we maintained 
it against all advertisers, who then as now wished to 
out-shriek one another in large type and ugly wood- 
cuts. 

It was by no means easy to hold a firm hand with 
the " live business men" of our village and country, 
who came out twice a year with the spring and fall 
announcements of their fresh stocks of goods, which 
they had personally visited New York to lay in ; but 
one of the moral advantages of an enterprise so modest 
as ours was( that the counting-room and the editorial- 
room were united under the same head, and this head 
was the editor's. After all, I think we lost nothing 
by the bold stand we made in behalf of good taste, 
and at any rate we risked it when we had not the 
courage to cut off our delinquent subscribers. 

We had business advertising from all the villages 
in the county, for the paper had a large circle of read- 
B 



18 IMPBESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

ers in eacli, and a certain authority, in virtue of repre- 
senting the county-seat. But a great deal of our 
advertising was of patent medicines, as the advertising 
still is in the country papers. It was very profitable, 
and so was the legal advertising, when we could get 
the money for it. The money had to come by order 
of court, and about half the time the order of court 
failed to include the costs of advertising. Then we 
did not get it, and we never got it, though we were 
always glad to get the legal advertising on the chance 
of getting the pay. It was not official, but was made 
up of the lawyers' notices to defendants of the suits 
brought against them. If it had all been paid for, I 
am not sure that we should now be in a position to 
complain of the ingratitude of the working-classes, or 
prepared to discuss, from a vantage of personal expe- 
rience, the duty of vast wealth to the community ; but 
still we should have been better ofi for that money, as 
•v^ll as the money we lost by a large and loyal list of 
delinquent subscribers. From time to time there were 
stirring appeals to these adherents in the editorial col- 
umns, which did not stir them, and again the most 
flattering offers to take any kind of produce in pay- 
ment of subscription. Sometimes my brother boldly 
tracked the delinquents to their laits. In most cases 



THE COUNTRY PRINTER. 19 

I fancy they escaped whatever arts he used to take 
them ; many died peacefully in their beds afterward, 
and their debts follow them to this day. Still, he 
must now and then have got money from them, and I 
am sure he did get different kinds of " trade." Once, 
I remember, he brought back in the tail of his wagon 
a young pig, a pig so very young that my father pro- 
nounced it " merely an organization." Whether it 
had been wrought to frenzy or not by the strange 
experiences of its journey, I cannot say, but as soon 
as it was set down on the ground it began to run 
madly, and it kept on running till it fell down and 
perished miserably. It had been taken for a year's 
subscription, and it was quite as if we had lost a de- 
linquent subscriber. 

V. 

Upon the whole, our paper was an attempt at con- 
scientious and self-respecting journalism ; it addressed 
itself seriously to the minds of its readers ; it sought 
to form their tastes and opinions. I do not know how 
much it influenced them, if it influenced them at 
all, and as to any effect beyond the circle of its sub- 
scribers, that cannot be imagined, even in a fond ret- 
rospect. But since no good effort is altogether lost, I 



20 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

am sure that this endeavor must have had some tacit 
effect ; and I am sure that no one got harm from a 
sincerity of conviction that devoted itself to the high- 
est interest of the reader, that appealed to nothing 
base, and flattered nothing foolish in him. It went 
from our home to the homes of the people in a very 
literal sense, for my father usually brought his ex- 
changes from the office at the end of his day there, 
and made his selections or wrote his editorials while 
the household work went on around him, and his 
children gathered about the same lamp, with their 
books or their jokes ; there were apt to be a good 
many of both. 

Our county was the most characteristic of that re- 
markable group of counties in northern Ohio called 
the Western Eeserve, and forty years ago the popula- 
tion was almost purely New England in origin, either 
by direct settlement from Connecticut, or indirectly 
after the sojourn of a generation in New York State. 
We were ourselves from southern Ohio, where the life 
was then strongly tinged by the adjoining life of Ken- 
tucky and Virginia, and we found these transplanted 
Yankees cold and blunt in their manners ; but we did 
not undervalue their virtues. They formed in that 
day a leaven of right thinking and feeling which was 



THE COUNTRY PRINTER. 21 

to leaven the wliole lump of the otherwise proslavery 
or indifferent state ; and I suppose that outside of the 
antislavery circles of Boston there was nowhere in 
the country a population so resolute and so intelligent 
in its political opinions. They were very radical in 
every way, and hospitable to novelty of all kinds. I 
imagine that they tested more new religions and new 
patents than have been even heard of in less inquiring 
communities. When we came among them they had 
lately been swept by the fires of spiritualism, which 
left behind a great deal of smoke and ashes where the 
inherited New England orthodoxy had been. A be- 
lief in the saving efficacy of spirit phenomena still 
exists among them, but not, I fancy, at all in the for- 
mer measure, when nearly every household had its 
medium, and the tables that tipped outnumbered the 
tables that did not tip. The old New York Tribune, 
which was circulated in the country almost as widely 
as our own paper, had deeply schooled the people in 
the economics of Horace Greeley, and they were ready 
for any sort of millenium, religious or industrial, that 
should arrive, while they looked very wisely after the 
main chance in the meantime. They were temperate, 
hard-working, hard-thinking folks, who dwelt on their 
scattered farms, and came up to the County Fair once 



22 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

a year, when tliey were apt to visit the printing-oflSce 
and pay for their papers. In spite of the English 
superstition to the contrary, the average American is 
not very curious, if one may judge from his reticence 
in the presence of things strange enough to excite 
question ; and if our craft surprised these witnesses 
they rarely confessed it. 

They thought it droll, as people of the simpler 
occupations are apt to think all the more complex arts ; 
and one of them once went so far in expression of his 
humorous conception as to say, after a long stare at 
one of the compositors dodging and pecking at the 
type in his case, " Like an old hen pickin' up millet." 
This sort of silence, and this sort of comment, both 
exasperated the printers, who took their revenge as 
they could. They fed it full, once, when a country 
subscriber's horse, tied before the office, crossed his 
hind-legs and sat down in bis harness like a tired 
man, and they proposed to go out and offer him a 
chair, to take him a glass of water, and ask him to 
come inside. But fate did not often give them such 
innings ; they mostly had to create their chances of 
reprisal, but they did not mind that. 

There was always a good deal of talk going on, but 
although we were very ardent politicians, the talk was 



THE COUNTRY PRINTER. 23 

not political. When it was not mere banter, it was 
mostly literary; we disputed about authors among 
ourselves, and with the village wits who dropped in. 
There were several of these who were readers, and 
they liked to stand with their backs to our stove and 
challenge opinion concerning Holmes and Poe, Irving 
and Macaulay, Pope and Byron, Dickens and Shake- 
speare. 

It was Shakespeare who was oftenest on our 
tongues; indeed, the printing-office of former days 
had so much affinity with the theatre that composi- 
tors and comedians were easily convertible ; and I have 
seen our printers engaged in hand-to-hand combats 
with column-rules, two up and two down, quite like 
the real bouts on the stage. Eeligion entered a good 
deal into our discussions, which my father, the most 
tolerant of men, would not suffer to become irreverent, 
even on the lips of law students bathing themselves in 
the fiery spirit of Tom Paine. He was willing to meet 
any one in debate of moral, religious, or political ques- 
tions, and the wildest-haired Comeouter, the most 
ruthless sceptic, the most credulous spiritualist, found 
him ready to take them seriously, even when it was 
hard not to take them in joke. 

It was part of his duty, as publisher of the paper, 



24 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

to bear patiently with anotlier kind of frequenter : the 
type of farmer who thought he wished to discontinue 
his paper, and really wished to be talked into continu- 
ing it. I think he rather enjoyed letting the subscriber 
talk himself out, and carrying him from point to point 
in his argument, always consenting that he knew best 
what he wanted to do, but skilfully persuading him 
at last that a home-paper was more suited to his needs 
than any city substitute. Once I could have given the 
heads of his reasoning, but they are gone from me 
now. The editor was especially interested in the farm- 
ing of the region, and I think it was partly owing to 
the attention he called to the question that its charac- 
ter was so largely changed. It is still a dairy country, 
but now it exports grain, and formerly the farmers 
had to buy their flour. 

He did not neglect any real local interest in his 
purpose of keeping his readers alive to matters of 
more general importance, but he was fortunate in ad- 
dressing himself to people who cared for the larger, if 
remoter, themes he loved. In fact, as long as slavery 
remained a question in our politics, they had a serious- 
ness and dignity which the present generation can 
hardly imagine ; and men of all callings felt themselves 
uplifted by the appeal this question made to their rea- 



THE COUNTRY PRINTER. 25 

son and conscience. My father constantly taught in 
his paper that if slavery could be kept out of the ter- 
ritories it would perish, and, as I have said, this was 
the belief of the vast majority of his readers. They 
were more or less fervid in it, according to their per- 
sonal temperaments ; some of them were fierce in their 
convictions, and some humorous, but they were all iu 
earnest. The editor sympathized more with those 
who took the true faith gayly. All were agreed that 
the Fugitive Slave Law was to be violated at any risk ; 
it would not have been possible to take an escaping 
slave out of that county without bloodshed, but the 
people would have enjoyed outwitting his captors more 
than destroying them. Even in the great John Brown 
times, when it was known that there was a deposit of 
his impracticable pikes somewhere in our woods, and 
he and his followers came and went among us on some 
mysterious business of insurrectionary aim, the affair 
had its droll aspects which none appreciated more 
keenly than the Quaker-born editor. With his cheer- 
ful scepticism, he could never have believed that any 
harm or danger would come of it all ; and I think he 
would have been hardly surprised to wake up any 
morning and find that slavery had died suddenly dur- 
ing the night, of its own iniquity. 



26 IMPKESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

He was lite all country editors tlien, and I dare say 
now, in being a printer as well as an editor, and lie 
took a full share in the mechanical labors. These were 
formerly much more burdensome, for twice or thrice 
the present type-setting was then done in the country 
offices. At the present day the country printer buys 
of a city agency his paper already printed on one side, 
and he gets it for the cost of the blank paper, the 
agency finding its account in the advertisements it 
puts in. Besides this patent inside, as it is called, the 
printer buys stereotyped selections of other agencies, 
which offer him almost as wide a range of matter as 
the exchange newspapers he used to choose from. 
The few columns left for local gossip and general news, 
and for whatever editorial comment he cares to make 
on passing events, can be easily filled up by two com- 
positors. But in my time we had three journeymen 
at work and two or three girl-compositors, and com- 
monly a boy-apprentice besides. The paper was richer 
in a personal quality, and. the printing-ofllce was un- 
questionably more of a school. After we began to 
take girl-apprentices it became coeducative, as far as 
they cared to profit by it ; but I think it did not serve 
to widen their thoughts or quicken their wits as it did 
those of the men. They looked to their craft as a 



THE COUNTRY PRINTEE. 27 

living, not as a life, and they liad no pride in it. They 
did not learn the .whole trade, as the journeymen had 
done, and served only such apprenticeship as fitted 
them to set type. They were then paid by the thou- 
sand ems, and their earnings were usually as great at 
the end of a month as at the end of a year. But the 
boy who came up from his father's farm, with the 
wish to be a printer because Franklin had been one, 
and with the intent of making the office his university, 
began by sweeping it out, by hewing wood and carry- 
ing water for it. He became a roller-boy, and served 
long behind the press before he was promoted to the 
case, where he learned slowly and painfully to set 
type. His wage was forty dollars a year and two suits 
of clothes, for three years, when his apprenticeship 
ended, and his wander-years (too often literally) be- 
gan. He was glad of being inky and stained with the 
marks of his trade ; he wore a four-cornered paper 
cap, in the earlier stages of his service, and even an 
apron. When he became a journeyman, he clothed 
himself in black doeskin and broadcloth, and put on a 
silk hat and the thinnest-soled fine boots that could 
be found, and comported himself as much like a man 
of the world as he knew how to do. His work 
brought him acquainted with a vast variety of inter- 



28 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

ests, and kept liis mind as well as hands employed ; he 
could not help thinking about them, and he did not 
fail to talk about them. His comments had generally 
a slightly acid flavor, and his constant survey of the 
world, in the "map of busy life" always under his 
eye, bred in him the contempt of familiarity. He was 
none the less agreeable for that, and the jokes that 
flew about from case to case in our office were some- 
thing the editor would have been the last man to 
interfere with. He read or wrote on through them all, 
and now and then turned from his papers to join in 
them. 

VI. 

The journeyman of that time and place was much 
better than the printer whom we had known earlier 
and in a more lax civilization, who was too apt to be 
sober only when he had not the means to be other- 
wise, and who arrived out of the unknown with noth- 
ing in his pocket, and departed into it with only 
money enough to carry him to the next printing-office. 
If we had no work for him it was the custom to take 
up a collection in the office, and he accepted it as a 
usage of the craft, without loss of self-respect. It 
could happen that his often infirmity would overtake 
him before he got out of town, but in this case he did 



THE COUNTRY PRINTER. 29 

not return for a second collection ; I suppose that 
would not liave been good form. Now and then a 
printer of this earlier sort appeared among us for a 
little time, but the air of the Western Reserve was 
somehow unfriendly to him, and he soon left us for 
the kindlier clime of the Ohio River, or for the more 
southerly region which we were ourselves sometimes 
so homesick for, and which his soft, rolling accent so 
pleasantly reminded us of. Still, there was something 
about the business — perhaps the arsenic in the type- 
metal- — which everywhere affected the morals as it was 
said sometimes to affect the nerves. 

There was one of our printers who was a capital 
compositor, a most engaging companion, and of unim- 
peachable Western Reserve lineage, who would work 
along in apparent perpetuity on the line of duty, and 
then suddenly deflect from it. If he wanted a day ofE, 
or several days, he would take the time, without no- 
tice, and with a princely indifference to any exigency 
we might be in. He came back when he chose, and 
offered to go to work again, and I do not remember 
that he was ever refused. He was never in drink ; his 
behavior was the effect of some obscure principle of 
conduct, unless it was that moral contagion from the 
material he wrouarht in. 



30 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

I do not know that lie was any naore characteristic, 
though, than another printer of ours, who was dear to 
my soul from the quaintness of his humor and his love 
of literature. I think he was, upon the whole, the 
most original spirit I have known, and it was not the 
least part of his originality that he was then aiming to 
become a professor in some college, and was diligently 
training himself for the calling in all the leisur-e he 
could get from his work. The usual thing would have 
been to read law and crowd forward in political life, 
but my friend despised this common ideal. We were 
both studying Latin, he quite by himself, as he studied 
Greek and German, and I with such help as I could 
find in reciting to a kindly old minister, who had for- 
gotten most of his own Latin, and whom I do not now 
Avish to blame for falling asleep over the lessons in my 
presence ; I did not know them well enough to keep 
him up to the work. My friend and I read the lan- 
guage, he more and I less, and we tried to speak it 
together, to give ourselves consequence, and to have 
the pleasure of saying before some people's faces what 
we should otherwise have said behind their backs; I 
should not now undertake to speak Latin to achieve 
either of these aims. Besides this, we read a great 
deal together, mainly Shakespeare and Cervantes. I 



THE COUNTRY PRINTER. 31 

had a task of a certain number of thousand ems a day, 
and when I had finished that I was free to do what I 
liked ; he would stop work at the same time, and then 
we would take our Don Quixote into some clean, sweet 
beech-woods there were near the village, and laugh 
our hearts out over it. I can see my friend's strange 
face now, very regular, very fine, and smooth as a 
girl's, with quaint blue eyes, shut long, long ago, to 
this dolce lome; and some day I should like to tell all 
about him ; but this is not the place. When the war 
broke out he left the position he had got by that time 
in some college or academy farther west' and went 
into the army. One morning, in Louisiana, he was 
killed by a guerilla who got a shot at him when he 
was a little Avay from his company, and who was prob- 
ably proud of picking off the Yankee captain. But as 
yet such a fate was unimaginable. He was the first 
friend of my youth ; he was older than I by five or six 
years ; but we met in an equality of ambition and pur- 
pose, though he was rather more inclined to the sever- 
ity of the scholar's ideal, and I hoped to slip through 
somehow with a mere literary use of my learning. 



82 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

VII. 
As I have tried to say, the printers of that day had 
nearly all some affinity with literature, if not some 
love of it ; it was in a sort always at their fingers-ends, 
and they must have got some touch of it whether they 
would or not. They thought their trade a poor one, 
moneywise, but they were fond of it and they did not 
often forsake it. Their hope was somehow to get hold 
of a country paper and become editors and publishers ; 
and my friend and I, when he was twenty-four and I 
eighteen, once crossed over into Pennsylvania, where 
we had heard there was a paper for sale ; but we had 
not the courage to oSer even promises to pay for it. 
The craft had a repute for insolvency which it merited, 
and it was at odds with the community at large by 
reason of something not immediately intelligible in it, 
or at least not classifiable. I remember that when I 
began to write a certain story of mine, I told Mark 
Twain, who was once a printer, that I was going to 
make the hero a printer, and he said, " Better not. 
People will not understand him. Printing is some- 
thing every village has in it, but it is always a sort of 
mystery, and the reader does not like to be perplexed 
by something that he thinks he knows about." This 
seemed very acute and just, though I made my hero 



THE COUNTRY PRINTER. 33 

a printer all the same, and I offer it to tlie public as a 
light on the anomalous relation the country printer 
bears to his fellow-citizens. They see him following 
his strange calling among them, but to neither wealth 
nor worship, and they cannot understand why he does 
not take up something else, something respectable and 
remunerative ; they feel that there must be something 
weak, something wrong in a man who is willing to 
wear his life out in a vocation which keeps him poor 
and dejiendent on the favor they grudge him. It is 
like the relation which all the arts bear to the world, 
and which is peculiarly thankless in a purely commer- 
cial civilization like ours; though I cannot pretend 
that printing is an art in the highest sense. I have 
heard old journeymen claim that it was a profession 
and ought to rank with the learned professions, but I 
am afraid that was from too fond a pride in it. It is 
in one sort a handicraft, like any other, like carpenter- 
ing or stone-cutting; but it has its artistic delight, as 
every handicraft has. There is the ideal in all work ; 
and I have had moments of unsurpassed gladness in 
feeling that I had come very near the ideal in what I 
had done in my trade. This joy is the right of every 
worker, and in so far as modern methods have taken 
it from him they have wronged him. I can under- 
C 



34 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

stand Ruskin in his wish, to restore it to some of the 
handicrafts which have lost it in the " base mechani- 
cal" operations of the great manufactories, where men 
spend their lives in making one thing, or a part of a 
thing, and cannot follow their work constructively. If 
that were to be the end, the operative would forever 
lose the delight in work which is the best thing in the 
world. But I hope this is not to be the end, and that 
when people like again to make things for use and not 
merely for profit, the Avorkraan will have again the re- 
Avard that is more than wages. 

I know that in the old-fashioned country printing- 
office we had this, and we enjoyed our trade as the 
decorative art it also is. Questions of taste constantly 
arose in the arrangement of a title-page, the display 
of a placard or a handbill, the use of this type or that. 
They did not go far, these questions, but they 
employed the critical faculty and the aesthetic instinct, 
and they allied us, however slightly and unconsciously, 
with the creators of the beautiful. 

But now, it must be confessed, printing has shared 
the fate of all other handicrafts. Thanks to united 
labor, it is better paid in each of its subdivisions than 
it once was as a whole. In my time, the hire of a 
first-rate country printer, who usually worked by the 



THE COUNTRY PRINTER. 35 

week, was a dollar a day ; but of course this was not 
so little in 1852 as it would be in 1892. My diildish 
remembrance is of the journeymen working two bours 
after supper, every night, so as to make out a day of 
tAvelve hours ; but at the time I write of the day of 
ten hours was the law and the rule, and nobody worked 
longer, except when the President's Message was to be 
put in type, or on some other august occasion. 

The pay is not only increased in proportion to the 
cost of living, but it is really greater, and the condi- 
tions are all very much better. But I believe no ap- 
prentice now learns the whole trade, and each of our 
printers, forty years ago, would have known how to 
do everything in the kind of office he hoped to own. 
He would have had to make a good many things 
which the printer now buys, and first among them the 
rollers, which are used for inking the type on the 
press. These were of a composition of glue and mo- 
lasses, and were of an india-rubbery elasticity and 
consistency, as long as they were in good condition. 
But with use and time they became hard, the ink 
smeared on them, and they failed to impart it evenly 
to the type ; they had to be thrown away, or melted 
over again. This was done on the office stove, in a 
large bucket which they v/ere cut up into, with fresh 



36 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

glue and molasses added. It seems in the retrospect 
to have been rather a simple affair, and I do not now 
see why casting a roller should have involved so much 
absolute failure, and rarely have given a satisfactory 
result. The mould was a large copper cylinder, and 
the wooden core of the roller was fixed in place by an 
iron cap and foot-piece. The mixture boiled away, as 
it now seems to me, for days, and far into the sleepy 
nights, when as a child I was proud of sitting up with 
it very late. Then at some weird hour, my father or 
my brother poured it into the mould, and we went 
home and left the rest with fate. The next morning 
the whole office crowded round to see the roller drawn 
from the mould, and it usually came out with such 
long hollows and gaps in its sides that it had to be 
cut up at once and melted over again. At present, 
all rollers are bought somewhere in New York or Chi- 
cago, I believe, and a printer would no more think of 
making a roller than of making any other part of his 
press. '' And you know," said my brother, who told 
me of this change, " we don't wet the paper now." 
"Good heavens," said I, "you don't print it«fry/" 
" Yes, and it doesn't blur any more than if it were 
wet." I suppose wetting the paper was a usage that 
antedated the invention of movable type. It used to 



THE COUNTRY PRINTER. 37 

be drawn, quire by quire, througli a vat of clear water, 
and then the night before publication day it was 
turned and sprinkled. Now it was printed dry, I felt 
as if it were time to class Benjamin Franklin with the 
sun-myths. 

VIII. 

Publication day was always a time of great excite- 
ment. We were busy all the morning getting the last 
editorials and the latest news in type, and when the 
paper went to press in the afternoon the entire force 
was drafted to the work of helping the engine and the 
press through their various disabilities and reluctances. 
Several hands were needed to run the press, even 
when it was in a willing frame ; others folded the pa- 
pers as they came from it ; as many more were called 
from their wonted work to address them to the sub- 
scribers ; for with the well-known fickleness of their 
sex, the young ladies of the village ceased to do this 
as soon as the novelty of the affair wore off. Still, 
the office was always rather a lively scene, for the 
paper was not delivered at the village houses, and each 
subscriber came and got his copy ; the villagers began 
to come about the hour we went to press, the neigh- 
boring farmers called next day and throughout the 
week. Nearly everybody who witnessed the throes of 



38 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

our machinery had advice or sympathy to ofEer, and 
in a place where many people were of a mechanical 
turn the spectacular failure of the editor's additions 
and improvements was naturally a source of public 
entertainment ; perhaps others got as much pleasure 
out of his inventions as he did. 

Of course, about election time the excitement was 
intensified ; we had no railroad or telegraphic commu- 
nication with the outer world, but it was felt that we 
somehow had the news, and it was known that we had 
the latest papers from Cleveland, and that our sheet 
would report the intelligence from them. After all, 
however, there was nothing very burning or seething 
in the eagerness of our subscribers. They could wait ; 
their knowledge of the event would not change it, or 
add or take away one vote either way. I dare say it 
is not so very different now, when the railroad and the 
telegraph have made the little place simultaneous with 
New York and London. We people who fret our 
lives out in cities do not know how tranquil life in 
the country still is. We talk of the whirl and rush, 
as if it went on everywhere, but if you will leave the 
express train anywhere and pass five miles into the 
country, away from the great through lines, you will 
not find the whirl and rush. People sometimes go 



THE COUNTRY PRINTER, 39 

mad there from the dulness and ennui, as in the cities 
they sometimes go mad from the stress and the strug- 
gle ; and the problem of equalizing conditions has no 
phase more interesting than that of getting the good 
of the city and the country out of the one into the 
other. The old-fashioned country newspaper formed 
almost the sole intellectual experience of the remote 
and quiet folks who dwelt in their lonely farmsteads 
on the borders of the woods, with few neighbors and 
infrequent visits to the township centre, where the 
church, a store or two, and a tavern constituted a vil- 
lage. They got it out of the post-office there once a 
week, and read it in the scanty leisure left them by 
their farm-work or their household drudgery, and I 
dare say they found it interesting. There were some 
men in every neighborhood, tongueyer than the rest, 
who, when they called on us, seemed to have got it by 
heart, and who were ready to defend or combat its 
positions with all comers ; this sort usually took some 
other paper, too, an agricultural paper, or the New 
York Tryhune, as they called it ; or a weekly edition 
of a Cleveland journal. It was generally believed that 
Horace Greeley wrote everything in the Trybune, and 
when a country subscriber unfolded his Trybune, he 
said, vath comfortable expectation, " Well, let's see 



40 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

what old Horace says this week." But by far the 
greater number of our subscribers took no paper but 
our own. I do not know whether there is much more 
reading done now on the farms, but I doubt it. In 
the villages, however, the circulation of the nearest 
city dailies is pretty general, and there is a large sale 
of the Sunday editions. I am not sure that this is an 
advantage, but in the undeniable decay of interest in 
the local preaching, some sort of mental relish for the 
only day of leisure is necessary. It is not so much a 
pity that they read the Sunday papers, as that the 
Sunday papers are so bad. If they were carefully and 
conscientiously made up, they would be of great use ; 
they wait their reformer, and they do not seem impa- 
tient for him. 

In the old time, we printers were rather more in 
touch with the world outside on the journalistic lines 
than most of our fellow-villagers, but otherwise we 
were as remote as any of them, and the weekly issue 
of the paper had not often anything tumultuously ex- 
citing for us. The greatest event of our year was the 
publication of the President's Message, which was a 
thrill in my childish life long before I had any con- 
ception of its meaning. I fancy that the patent inside, 
now so universally used by the country papers, orig- 



THE COUNTRY PRINTER. 41 

inated in the custom wliicli the printers within easy 
reach of a large city had of supplying themselves with 
an edition of the President's Message, to be folded 
into their own sheet, when they did not print their 
outside on the hack of it. There was always a hot 
rivalry between the local papers in getting out the 
Message, whether it was bought ready printed, or 
whether it was set up in the office and printed in the 
body of the paper. We had no local rival, but all the 
same we made haste when it was a question of the 
Message. The printers filled their cases with type, 
ready for the early copy of the Message, Avhich the 
editor used every device to secure ; when it was once 
in hand they worked day and night till it was all up, 
and then the paper was put to press at once, without 
regard to the usual publication day ; and the commu- 
nity was as nearly electrified as could be with our 
journalistic enterprise, which was more important in 
our eyes than the matters the Message treated of. 

There is no longer the eager popular expectation of 
the President's Message that there once seemed to be ; 
and I think it is something of a loss, that ebb of the 
high tide of political feeling which began with the era 
of our immense material prosperity. It was a feeling 
that formed a solidarity of all the citizens, and if it 



42 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

was not always, or often, the higliest interest whicli 
can unite men, it was at least not that deadly and self- 
ish cult of business which centres each of us in his 
own affairs and kills even our curiosity about others. 
Very likely people were less bent on the pursuit of 
wealth in those days, because there was less chance 
to grow rich, but the fact remains that they tvere less 
bent in that direction, and that they gave their minds 
to other things more than they do now. I think those 
other things were larger things, and that our civic 
type was once nobler than it is. It was before the 
period of corruption, when it was not yet fully known 
that dollars can do the work of votes, when the votes 
as yet rather outnumbered the dollars, and more of 
us had the one than the other. The great statesman, 
not the great millionaire, was then the American ideal, 
and all about in the villages and on the farms the peo- 
ple were eager to know what the President had said 
to Congress. They are not eager to know now, and 
that seems rather a pity. Is it because in the war 
which destroyed slavery, the American Democracy 
died, and by operation of the same fatal anomaly the 
American Plutocracy, which Lincoln foreboded, was 
born ; and the people instinctively feel that they have 
no longer the old interest in President or Congress ? 



\ \ 



THE COUNTRY PRINTER. 43 

There are those that say so, and, whether they are 
right or not, it is- certain that into the great centres 
where money is heaped up the life of the country is 
drained, and the country press has suffered with the 
other local interests. The railroads penetrate every- 
where, and carry the city papers seven times a week, 
where the home paper pays its tardy visit once, Avith 
a patent inside imported from the nearest money-cen- 
tre, and its few columns of neighborhood gossip, too 
inconsiderable to be gathered up by the correspond- 
ents of the invasive dailies. Other causes have worked 
against the country press. In counties where there 
were once two or three papers, there are novr eight or 
ten, without a material increase of population to draw 
upon for support. The county printing, which the 
paper of the dominant party could reckon upon, is 
now shared with other papers of the same politics, and 
the amateur printing-offices belonging to ingenious 
boys in every neighborhood get much of the small job- 
work which once came to the publisher. 

It is useless to quarrel with the course of events, for 
which no one is more to blame than another, though 
human nature loves a scapegoat, and from time to time 
we load up some individual with the common sins, and 
drive him into a wilderness where he seems rather to 



44 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

enjoy himself than otherwise. I suppose that even if 
the conditions had continued favorable, the country 
press could never have become the influence which 
our editor fondly hoped and earnestly strove to make 
it. Like all of us who work at all, the country printer 
had to work too hard ; and he had little time to think 
or to tell how to make life better and truer in any 
sort. His paper had once perhaps as much influence 
as the country pulpit ; its support was certainly of the 
same scanty and reluctant sort, and it was without 
consecration by an avowed self-devotion. He was con- 
cerned with the main chance first, and after that there 
was often no other chance, or he lost sight of it. I 
should not instance him as an exemplary man, and I 
should be very far from idealizing him ; I should not 
like even to undertake the task of idealizing a city 
journalist ; and yet, in the retrospect at least, the coun- 
try printer has his pathos for me — the pathos of a man 
who began to follow a thankless calling because he 
loved it, and kept on at it because he loved it, or else 
because its service had warped and cramped him out 
of form to follow any other. 



POLICE REPORT. 

One day in summer, when people whom I had been 
urging to behave in some degree like human beings 
persisted in acting rather more like the poor creatures 
who pass for men and women in most stage-plays, I 
shut my manuscript in a drawer, and the next morning 
took an early train into the city. I do not remember 
just what whim it was that led me to visit the police 
court : perhaps I went because it was in the dead vast 
and middle of the summer, and the town afforded lit- 
tle other amusement ; perhaps it was because, in my 
revolt against unreality, I was in the humor to see life 
whose reality asserts itself every day in the newspa- 
pers with indisputable force. If this was so, I was 
fated to a measure of disappointment, for when the 
court opened this reality often appeared no more sub- 
stantial than the fiction with which I had lost my pa- 
tience at home. But I am bound to say that it was 
much more entertaining, and that it was, so to speak, 
much more artistically treated. It resolved itself into 



46 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

melodrama, or romantic tragedy, having a prevailing 
comic interest, with moments of intensity, and with. 
effects so thrilling that I came away with a sense of 
the hiarhest theatrical illusion. 



The police court in Boston is an upper room of the 
temple of justice, and is a large, square, dismal-com- 
plexioned chamber, with the usual seams and cracks 
configuring its walls and ceilings ; its high, curtainless 
windows were long glares of sunless light, crossed 
with the fine drizzle of an easterly rain on the morning 
of my visit. About one-third of the floor is allotted to 
spectators, and supplied with benches of penitential 
severity ; the remaining space is occupied by a series 
of curved tables set in a horse-shoe, and by a raised 
platform, railed off from the auditorium, as I may call 
it, and supporting in successive gradations the clerk's 
desk, on a very long, narrow table, and the judge's 
table and easy-chair. At either end of the table on 
which the clerk's desk was placed was a bar, repre- 
senting in one case the witness stand, and in the other 
the prisoner's box ; midway, the clerk stood within a 
screen of open iron-work, hemmed in with books of 
record and tin boxes full of docketed papers. 



POLICE REPORT. 47 

Outside of the railing were the desks of two officers 
of the court, whose proper titles my unfamiliarity Avith 
the place disables me from giving. They were both 
well in flesh, as I remember, and in spite of their blue 
flannel suits and the exercise of a wise discretion, by 
which one of them had discarded his waistcoat and 
neckcloth, they visibly suffered from the moist, close 
heat which the storm outside had driven into the 
court-room. From time to time one of them cried 
out, " Silence ! " to quell a restive movement in the 
audience ; and once the cravatless officer left his place, 
and came down to mine near the door, and drove out 
the boys who were sitting round me. " Leave ! " he 
shouted. " This is no place for boys ! " They went 
out obediently, and some others just like them came 
in immediately and took their places. They might 
have been the same boys, so far as any difference for 
the better in their looks went. They were not pleas- 
ant to the eye, nor to any other sense ; and neither 
were the young men nor old men who for the rest 
formed the audience of this free dramatic spectacle. 
Their coat-collars came up above their shirt-collars; 
but, g-reasy as they were, the observer could not regret 
this misfit when chance gave an occasional glimpse of 
their linen — or their cotton, to be exact. For the 



48 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPEKIENCES. 

most part, they wore their hair very short, and exposed 
necks which I should, I believe, have preferred to 
have covered. Under the influence of the humid 
heat, and with the wet they brought from the outside, 
they sent up a really deplorable smell. I do not know 
that I have a right to criticise the appearance of some 
of their eyes — they seemed perfectly good eyes to see 
with, in spite of their sinister or vacant expression and 
gloomy accessories ; and certain scars and mutilations 
of the face and fingers were the affair of their owners 
rather than mine. Whenever they fell into talk, an 
officer of the court marched upon them and crushed 
them to silence. " This is no place for conversation," 
he said ; and the greater part of them had evidently 
no disposition or capacity for that art. I believe they 
were men and boys whose utmost mental effort sufficed 
to let their mouths hang open in the absorption of the 
performance, and was by no means equal to comment 
upon it. I fancied that they came there, day after 
day, the year round, and enjoyed themselves in their 
poor way, realizing many of the situations presented 
by experience of like predicaments, more than by 
sympathy or an effort of the imagination. 

I had taken my place among them next the door, 
so that if my courage failed me at any time I could go 



POLICE REPORT. 49 

out without disturbing tlie others. One need not be 
a very proud man- to object to classing himself with 
them, and there were moments when I doubted if I 
could stand my fellow-spectators much longer ; but 
these accesses of arrogance passed, as I watched the 
preparations for the play with the interest of a novice. 
There were already half a dozen policemen seated at 
the tables in semicircle, and chatting pleasantly to- 
gether ; and their number was constantly increased by 
new arrivals, who, as they came in, put their round- 
topped straw hats on one end of the semicircle, and 
sat down to fill out certain printed forms, which I 
suppose related to the arrests they had made, for they 
were presently handed to the clerk, who used them in 
calling up the cases. A little apart from the police- 
men was a group of young men, whom I took to be 
the gentlemen of the bar ; among them, rather more 
dapper than the rest, was a colored lawyer, who after- 
wards, by an irony of Nemesis, appeared for some 
desperate and luckless defendants of the white race 
and of Irish accent. By and by two or three desks, 
placed conveniently for seeing and hearing everything 
against the railing on the clerk's right, were occupied 
by reporters, unmistakable with their pencil and pa- 
per. Looking from them I saw that the judge's chair 
D 



50 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

was now filled by a quiet-looking gentleman, who 
seemed, behind his spectacles, to be communing with 
himself in a sad and bored anticipation. At times he 
leaned forward and spoke with the clerk or one of the 
gentlemen of the bar, and then fell back in sober 
meditation. 

Like all other public exhibitions, the police court 
failed a little in point of punctuality. It was adver- 
tised to open at nine o'clock, but it was nearer ten 
when, after several false alarms, the clerk in a rapid, 
inarticulate formula declared it now opened, and in- 
voked the blessing of God on the Commonwealth of 
Massachusetts. Even then there was a long wait be- 
fore we of the audience heard the scuffling of the feet 
of the prisoners on what seemed a broad stairway be- 
hind the barrier at the judge's right, and before any 
of them came in sight they were commanded by the 
attendant policeman to sit down, and apparently did 
so, on the top of the stairs. The clerk now turned 
towards them with a sheaf of the forms which the 
policemen had filled out in his hand, and successively 
addressed them by name : — 

" Larry McShane ! " 

"Here, sor." 

"Complained of for being drunk. Guilty or not 
guilty ? " 



POLICE REPORT. 51 

"Guilty, sor." 

" Pay a fine of- one dollar and costs, and stand com- 
mitted to the House of Industry." 

He jotted sometliing down on the back of each 
indictment, and half turned to toss it on to his desk, 
and then resumed the catalogue of these offenders, 
accusing and dooming them all in the same weary and 
passionless monotone. 

I confess that I had at the time the strongest curi- 
osity to see them, but it has since struck me that it 
was a finer effect merely to hear their voices in re- 
sponse, and to leave their figures and faces to the 
fancy. Sometimes the voice that answered " Guilty " 
was youthful, and sometimes, I grieve to say, it was 
feminine, though under the circumstances it had nat- 
urally that subdued tone which is thought such an 
excellent thing in woman. Usually, however, the 
voices were old and raucous, as if they had many 
times made the same plea in the same place, and they 
pronounced sir sor. The clerk's sheaf of accusations 
being exhausted, they all apparently scuflQed down- 
stairs again. But a number must have remained, for 
now, after this sort of overture, the entertainment be- 
gan in earnest, the actors on the scene appearing as 
they were summoned from the same invisible space 



52 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

behind the railing, which I think was probably sunk 
a little lower than the level of the auditorium, and 
which might, to humor the theatrical illusion, be re- 
garded as the green-room. 

II. 

The first piece was what I may call a little Police 
Pastoral, in recognition of the pretty touch of poetry 
which graced it. A half-grown, baddish-looking boy 
was arraigned for assault and battery, and took his 
place at one end of that long table on which rested 
the clerk's desk, while a young girl of thirteen or 
fourteen advanced from the audience, and placed her- 
self at the other end. She was dressed in a well-fitting 
ready-made suit, which somehow suggested itself as 
having been "■ marked down " to come within her 
means ; and she wore a cheap yet tasteful hat, under 
which her face, as honest as it was comely, looked 
modestly up at the judge when he questioned her. It 
appeared that she was passing the apple-stand which 
the defendant was keeping for his mother, when he 
had suddenly abandoned his charge, followed her into 
a gate where she had taken refuge, and struck her ; 
her cries attracted the police, and he was arrested. 
The officer corroborated her story, and then the judge 



POLICE REPORT, 53 

made a signal to tlie prisoner, by -wliicli it seemed 
that lie was privileged to cross-question his accuser. 
The injured youth seized the occasion, and in a loud- 
bullying, yet plaintive tone proceeded as best he could 
to damage the case against him. 

He : " Didn't you pass my mother's stand with 
them girls the day before ? " 

She, frankly : " Yes, I did:' 

He : " And didn't you laugh at me, and call me an 
apple-woman ? " 

She, as before : " Yes, I did.^' 

He : " And hain't you hit me, sometimes, before 
this ? " 

She, evasively : " I've never hit you to hurt you." 

He : " Now, that hain't the question ! The question 
is whether you've ever hit me." 

She : " Yes, I have — when you were trying to hold 
me. It was the other girls called you names. I only 
called you names once." 

He : " I want to know whether I hurt you any when 
you hollered out that way ? " 

She : " Yes, you did. And if I hadn't screamed 
you would have done it, I don't suppose you'd have 
hurt me a great deal, but you have hurt some of the 
girls." 



54 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

The Judge : " Did he bruise you severely when he 
struck you ? " 

She, with a relenting glance, full of soft compassion, 
at her enemy : " Well, he didn't bruise me very much." 

The Judge : " Has he been in the habit of assault- 
ing the other young girls ? " 

She : "He never did me before." Then, with a sud- 
den burst, " And I think I was every bit as much to 
blame as he was ! I had no business to tease him." 

Here the judge, instead of joining the hands of 
these children, and sending them forward with his 
blessing, to dance and sing a little duet together, as 
would have happened on any other stage, said that 
he would fine the defendant seven dollars. The de- 
fendant gave way to a burst of grief, and the plaintiff, 
astonished at this untoward conclusion, threw the 
judge a pathetic and reproachful look, and left the 
stand in painful bewilderment. I felt sorry for her, 
but I could not share her pity for the defendant, and 
my light mind was quickly distracted by the next 

piece. 

III. 

I MAT say here that the features of the performance 
followed one another rapidly, as at a variety theatre, 
without any disagreeable waits or the drop of a cur- 



POLICE REPORT. 55 

tain. If I had anything to complain of it was the 
swiftness of their succession. I was not yet habitu- 
ated to this, when I found the scene occupied by the 
two principal actors in a laughable little interlude of 
Habitual Drunkenness. A powerfully built, middle- 
aged Irishman, with evidences of coal-heaving thick 
upon his hands and ground into his face to the roots 
of his hair, was standing at one end of that long table, 
aud listening to the tale of the policeman who, finding 
him quarrelsomely and noisily drunk, and not being 
able to prevail with him to go home, had arrested him. 
When he finished, the judge said to the defendant, 
who had stood rolling his eyes — conspicuous from the 
black around them — upon the spectators, as if at a 
loss to make out what all this might be about, that he 
could ask any questions he liked of the plaintiff. 

" I don't want to ask him anything, sor," replied 
the defendant, like one surprised at being expected to 
take an interest in some alien affair. 

" Have you ever seen the defendant drunk before ? " 
asked the judge. 

" Yes, your honor ; I've seen him drunk half a 
dozen times, and I've taken him home to keep him 
out of harm's way. He's an industrious man when 
he isn't in drink." 



56 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

" Is he usually disorderly v/hen drunk?" 

" Well, he and his wife generally fight when he 
gets home," the policeman suggested. 

The judge desisted, and the defendant's counsel 
rose, and signified his intention to cross-question the 
plaintiff : the counsel was that attorney of African race 
whom I have mentioned. 

'* Now, we don't deny that the defendant was drunk 
at the time of his arrest ; but the question is whether 
he is an habitual drunkard. How many times have 
you seen him drunk the past month ? " 

"Ahout half a dozen times." 

" Seven times ? " 

" I can't say." 

" Three times ? " 

" More than three times." 

" More than twice you will swear to ? " 

" Yes." 

" Now, I wish you to be very careful, please : can 
you state, under oath, that you have seen him drunk 
four times ? " 

"Yes," said the policeman, " I can swear to that." 

" Very good," said the counsel, with the air of hav- 
ing caught the witness tripping. "That is all." 

Aside from the satisfaction that one naturally feels 



POLICE EEPOBT. 57 

in seeing any policeman bullied, I think it did me 
good to have my learned colored brother badger a 
white man. The thing was so long the other way, in 
every walk of life, that for the sake of the bad old 
times, when the sight would have been something to 
destroy the constitution and subvert social order, I 
could have wished that he might have succeeded bet- 
ter in browbeating his witness. But it was really a 
failure, as far as concerned his object. 

" The question, your honor," the lawyer added, 
turning to the judge, " is, what is habitual drunken- 
ness ? I should like to ask the defendant a query or 
two. Now, Mr. O'Eyan, how often do you indulge 
yourself in a social glass ? " 

"Sor?" 

" How often do you drink ? " 

" Whenever I can get it, sor." 

The audience appreciated this frankness, and were 
silenced by a threatening foray of the cravatless officer. 

"You mean," suggested the attorney, smoothly, 
" that you take a drink of beer, now and then, when 
you are at work." 

" I mane that, sor. A horse couldn't do widout it." 

" Very good. But you deny that you are habitu- 
ally intoxicated ? " 



58 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

" Sor ? " 

" You are not in the habit of getting drunk ? " 

" No, sor ! " 

" Very good. You are not in the habit of getting 
drunk." 

" I never get dhrunk whin I'm at work sor. I get 
dhrunk Saturday nights." 

" Yes ; when you have had a hard week's work. I 
understand that " — 

" I have a hard wake's Avorruk every wake ! " inter- 
rupted the defendant. 

"But this is a thing that has grown upon you of 
late, as I understand. You were formerly a sober, 
temperate man, as your habits of industry imply." 

" Sor ? " 

"You have lately given way to a fondness for 
liquor, but up to within six months or a year ago you 
never drank to excess." 

" No, sor ! I've dhrunk ever since I was born, and 
I'll dhrink till I die." 

The officer could not keep us quiet, now. The 
counsel looked down at his table in a futile way, and 
then took his seat after some rambling observations, 
amid smiles of ironical congratulation from the other 
gentlemen of the bar. 



POLICE REPORT. 59 

The defendant confronted tlie judge with the calm 
face of a man who has established his innocence be- 
yond cavil. 

" What is the reputation of this man in his neigh- 
borhood ? " inquired the judge of the policeman. 

" He's an ugly fellow. And his wife is full as bad. 
They generally get drunk together." 

" Any children ? " 

" No, sir." 

The defendant regarded the judge with heightened 
satisfaction in this confirmation of his own declaration. 
The judge leaned over, and said in a confidential way 
to the clerk, *' Give him six months in the House of 
Correction." 

A wild lament broke from the audience, and a wom- 
an with a face bruised to a symphony in gTcen, yel- 
low, and black thus identified herself as the wife of 
the defendant, who stood vacantly turning his cap 
round in his hand while sympathizing friends hurried 
her from the room. The poor creature probably 
knew that if in their late differences she had got more 
than she deserved, she had not got more than she had 
been willing to give, and was moved by this reflection. 
Other moralists, who do not like to treat woman as a 
reasonable being, may attribute her sorrow to mere 



60 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

blind tenderness, or liysterical excitement. I could 
not see that it touclied the spectators in any way ; and 
I suspect that, whatever was thought of her escape 
from a like fate, there was a general acquiescence in the 
justice of his. He was either stunned by it, or failed 
to take it in, for he remained standing at tlie end of 
the table and facing the judge, till the policeman in 
charge took him by the arm and stood him aside. 

IV. 

He sat down, and I saw him no more ; but I had no 
time to regret him, for his place was instantly occu- 
pied by a person who stepped within the bar from the 
audience. I had already noticed him coming in and 
going out of the court-room, apparently under strong 
excitement, and hovering about, now among the gen- 
tlemen of the bar, and now among friends in the 
audience. He had an excited and eccentric look, and 
yet he looked like a gentleman — a gentleman in 
distress of mind ; I had supposed that he could not be 
one of the criminal classes, or he would scarcely have 
been allowed so much at large. At the same time 
that he took his place he was confronted from the other 
end of the long table by a person whom I will call a 
lady, because I observed that every one else did so. 



POLICE KEPOKT. 61 

This lady's person tended to fat ; she had a large, red 
face, and I learned without surprise that she was a 
cook. She wore a crimson shawl, and a bonnet 
abounding in blossoms and vegetables of striking col- 
ors, and she had one arm, between the wrist and elbow, 
impressively swathed in linen; she caressed, as it 
were, a small water-pitcher, which I felt, in spite of its 
ordinary appearance, was somehow historical. In 
fact, it came out that this pitcher played an important 
part in the assault which the lady accused the gentle- 
man at the other end of the table of committing upon 
her. 

It seemed from her story that the gentleman was a 
boarder in the house where she was cook, and that he 
was in the habit of intruding upon her in the kitchen 
against her will and express command. A week be- 
fore (I understood that she had spent the intervening 
time in suffering and disability) she had ordered 
him out, and he had turned furiously upon her with 
an uplifted chair and struck her on the arm with 
it, and then had thrown at her head the pitcher 
which she now held in her hands. There were other 
circumstances of outrage, which I cannot now recall, 
but they are not important in view of the leading 
facts. 



62 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

Further testimony in' behalf of the plaintiff was 
offered by another lady, whose countenance expressed 
second-girl as unmistakably as that of the plaintiff 
expressed cook. She was of the dish-faced Irish type, 
and whereas the cook Avas of an Old- World robustness, 
her witness had the pallor and flat-chestedness of the 
women of her race who are born in America ; she pre- 
ferred several shades of blue in her costume, which 
was of re^dy-made and marked-down effect. This lady 
with difficulty comprehended the questions intended 
to elicit her name and the fact of her acquaintance 
with the plaintiff, and I noticed a like density of un- 
derstanding in most of the other persons testifying or 
arraigned in this court. In fact, I came to wonder if 
the thick-headedness of average uneducated people 
was not much greater than I had hitherto suspected, 
in my easy optimism. It was certainly inconceivable 
why, with intelligence enough to come in when it 
rained, the cook should have summoned this witness. 
She testified at once that she had not seen the assault, 
and did not know that the cook had been hurt ; and 
no prompting of the plaintiff's counsel could inspire 
her with a better recollection. In the hands of the 
defendant's lawyer she developed the fact that his cli- 
ent was reputed a quiet, inoffensive boarder, and that 



POLICE REPORT. 63 

she never knew of any displeasures between liim and 
the cook, 

" Did you ever see this lady intoxicated ? " inquired 
the lawyer. 

The witness reflected. "I don't understand you," 
she answered, finally. 

"Have you ever known her to be overcome by 
drink ? " 

The witness considered this point also, and in due 
time gave it up, and turned a face of blank appeal up- 
on the judge, who came to her rescue. 

" Does she drink, — drink liquor ? Does she get 
drunk ? " 

" Oh ! Oh, yes ; she's tipsy sometimes." 

" Was she tipsy," asked the lawyer, " on the day 
of the alleged assault ? " 

The witness again turned to the magistrate for help. 

*' Was she tipsy on the day when she says this gen- 
tleman struck her with a chair, and threw the pitcher 
at her head ? " 

" Yes, sir," replied the witness, " she was." 

" Was she very tipsy ? " the lawyer pursued. 

The witness was equal to this question. "Well, 
yes, sir, she was. Any way, she hadn't left anything 
in the bottle on her bureau." 



64 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPEKIENCES. 

" When did you see the bottle full ? " 

" The night before. Or in the evening. She com- 
menced drinking in the night." 

" AVhat was in the bottle? " 

" A pint of whiskey." 

'* That will do," said the lawyer. 

The witness stepped down, and genteelly resumed 
her place near the plaintifE. Neither of the ladies 
changed countenance, or seemed in any wise aware 
that the testimony just given had been detrimental to 
the plaintiff's cause. They talked pleasantly together, 
and were presently alike interested in the testimony of 
a witness to the defendant's good character. He tes- 
tified that the defendant was a notoriously peaceable 
person, who was in some sort of scientific employment, 
but where or what I could not make out; he was a col- 
lege graduate, and it was quite unimaginable to the wit- 
ness that he should be the object of this sort of charge. 

When the witness stood aside, the defendant was 
allowed to testify in his own behalf, which he did 
with great energy. He provided himself with a chair, 
and when he came to the question of the assault he 
dramatized the scene with appropriate action. He 
described with vividness the relative positions of him- 
self and the cook when, on the day given, he went into 



POLICE KEPORT. 65 

the kitchen to see if the landlady were there, and was 
ordered out by her. " She didn't give me time to go, 
but caught up a chair, and came at me, thus ! " Here 
he represented with the chair in his hand an assault 
that made the reporters, who sat near him, quail be- 
fore the violence of the mere dumb-show. " I caught 
the rung of the chair in my hand, thus, and instinct- 
ively pushed it, thus. I suppose," he added, in dic- 
tion of memorable elegance, " that the impact of the 
chair in falling back against her wrist may have pro- 
duced the contusions of which she complains." 

The judge and the bar smiled ; the audience, not 
understanding, looked serious. 

'' And what," said the judge, " about throwing the 
pitcher at her ? " 

" I never saw the pitcher, your honor, till I saw it 
in court. I threw no pitcher at her, but retreated 
from the kitchen as quickly as possible." 

''That will do," said the judge. The plaintiff's 
counsel did the best that could be done for no case 
at all in a brief argument. The judge heard him pa- 
tiently, and then quietly remarked, "The charge is 
dismissed. The defendant is discharged. Call the 
next case." 

The plaintiff had probably imagined that the affair 
E 



66 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

was going in her favor. She evidently required the 
explanation of her counsel that it had gone against 
her, and all was over; for she looked at the judge in 
some surprise, before she turned and walked out of 
the court-room with quiet dignity, still caressing her 
pitcher, and amicably accompanied by the other lady, 
her damaging witness. 

V. 
Before she was well out of the door, a lady-like 
young woman in black was on the stand, testifying 
against a prisoner, who did not confront her from the 
other end of the long table, but stood where he seemed 
to have been seated on the top of those stairs I have 
imagined behind the railing. He looked twenty one 
or two years of age, and he had not at all a bad face, 
but rather refined ; he was well dressed, and was gen- 
tleman-like in the same degree that she was lady-like. 
From her testimony it appeared to me that his offense 
was one that might fitly be condoned, and in my igno- 
rance I was surprised to find that it was taken seri- 
ously by the court. She had seen him, from the top 
of some steps in the shop where she was employed, 
open a drawer in the book-keeper's desk, and take out 
of it a revolver and some postage-stamps ; but on his 
discovering her he had instantly replaced them and 



POLICE REPORT. 67 

tried to make Ms escape. She gave her evidence in a 
low voice, and, as I thought, reluctantly; and one 
could very well imagine that she might have regretted 
causing his arrest ; but it was to be considered that 
her own reputation was probably at stake, and if his 
theft had succeeded she might have been accused of 
it. When she stood aside, the judge turned to the 
defendant, who had kept quite still, nervously twist- 
ing something between his fingers, and questioned 
him. He did not attempt to deny the facts ; he ad- 
mitted them, but urged that he had immediately put 
the stamps and pistol back into the drawer, from 
which, indeed, he had hardly lifted them. The judge 
heard him patiently, and the young man went on, with 
something of encouragement, to explain that he only 
meant to take the things to spite the owner of the 
shop, on account of some grudge between them, and 
that he had not realized that it was stealing. He be- 
sought the judge, in terms that were moving, but not 
abject, to deal mercifully with him; and he stood 
twisting that invisible something between his fingers, 
and keeping his eyes fixed on those of the magistrate 
with a miserable smile, while he promised that he 
would not offend again. 

The judge passed his hand to and fro over his chin. 



68 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

and now dropped his eyes, and now glanced at the 
culprit, who seemed scarcely more unhappy. 

" Haven't I seen you here before ? " he asked at 
last. 

" Yes," I could hardly hear the prisoner assent. 

" How often ? " 

" Twice." 

"What for?" 

" Theft," gasped the wretched creature. 

The judge moved in his chair with a discomfort 
that he had not shown throughout the morning's bus- 
iness. " If this were the first time, or the second, I 
should have been glad to let you off with a slight fine. 
But I can't do that now. I must send you to the 
House of Correction." He nodded to the clerk: 
" Two months." 

The prisoner remained, with that nervous twisting 
of his fingers, eying the judge with his vague smile, 
as if he could not realize what had befallen. He did 
not sit down till the next culprit rose and stood near 
him. Then a sort of fatal change passed over his face. 
It looked like despair. I confess that I had not much 
heart for his successor. I was sick, thinking how, so 
far as this world was concerned, this wretch had been 
sent to hell; for the House of Correction is not a 



rOLICE KEPORT. 69 

purgatory even, out of wliicli one can hopefully under- 
take to pray periculant spirits. To be sure, the police 
court is not a cure of souls ; and doubtless his doom 
was as light as the law allowed. But I could have 
wished that the judge had distrusted his memory, or 
taken on his conscience the merciful sin of ignoring it. 
He seemed very patient, and I do not question but he 
acted according to light and knowledge. This may 
have been a hopeless thief. But it was nevertheless a 
terrible fate. The chances were a thousand against 
one that he should hereafter be anything but a thief, 
if he were not worse. After all, when one thinks of 
what the consequences of justice are, one doubts if 
there is any justice in it. Perhaps the thing we call 
mercy is the divine conception of justice. 

VI. 

It was a thief again who was on the stage ; but not 
a thief like that other, who, for all the reality there 
was in the spectacle, might have gone behind the 
scenes and washed the chalk off his white face. This 
thief was of the kind whose fortunes the old natural- 
istic novelists were fond of following in fictions of 
autobiographic form, and who sometimes actually 
wrote their own histories; a conventional thief, of 



*m 



70 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

those dear to De Foe and tlie Spanish picaresque ro- 
mancers, with a flavor of good literature about him. 
Nothing could have been more classic in incident than 
the story of the plaintiff, an honest-looking young fel- 
low, who testified that he had met the prisoner on the 
street, and, learning that he was out of work and out 
of money, had taken him home to his room and shared 
his bed with him. I do not know in just what calling 
this primitive and trustful hospitality is practiced ; the 
plaintiff looked and was dressed like a workingman. 
His strange bedfellow proved an early riser ; he stole 
away without disturbing his host, and carried with 
him all the money that was in his host's pockets. By 
an odd turn of luck the two encountered shortly after 
breakfast, and the prisoner ran. The plaintiff followed, 
but the other eluded him, and was again sauntering 
about in safety, when the eye of a third actor in the 
drama fell upon him. This was a young man who 
kept some sort of small shop, and who was called to 
the witness-stand in behalf of the prosecution. He 
was as stupid as he could well be in some respects, 
and very simple questions had to be repeated several 
times to him. Yet he had the ferret-like instinct of 
the thief-catcher, and he instantly saw that his look 
fluttered the guilty rogue, who straightway turned and 



POLICE REPOET. 71 

fled. But this time he had a sharper pursuer than his 
host, and he was coursed through all his turns and 
windings, up stairs and down, in houses and out, and 
gripped at last. 

" As soon as I saw him start to run," said the wit- 
ness, who told his story with a graphic jauntiness, " I 
knowed he'd got something." 

"You didnH know I'd got anything!" exclaimed 
the thief. 

*' I knowed you'd get ninety days if I caught up 
with you," retorted the witness, wagging his head tri- 
umphantly. 

As the officer entered the station-house with his 
prisoner, the host, by another odd chance, was coming 
out, after stating his loss to the police, and identified 
his truant guest. 

The money, all but thirty cents, was found upon 
him ; and though he represented that he had lawfully 
earned it by haying in Dedham, the fact that it was 
in notes of the denominations which the plaintiff re- 
membered was counted against him, and he got the 
ninety days which his captor had prophesied. He, 
too, sat down, and I saw him no more. 



72 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

VII. 

Now arose literally a cloud of witnesses, who came 
forward from some of tlie back seats, and occupied 
the benches hitherto held by the plaintiffs and wit- 
nesses in the preceding cases. They were of all shades 
of blackness, and of both sexes and divers ages, and 
they were there in their solemn best clothes, with 
their faces full of a decorous if superficial seriousness. 
I must except from this sweeping assertion, however, 
the lady who was the defendant in the case : she was 
a young person, with a great deal of what is called 
style about her, and I had seen her going and coming 
throughout the morning in a high excitement, which 
she seemed to enjoy. It is difficult for a lady whose 
lips have such a generous breadth and such a fine out- 
ward roll to keep from smiling, perhaps, under any 
circumstances ; and it may have been light-heartedness 
rather than light-mindedness that enabled her to sup- 
port so gayly a responsibility that weighed down all 
the other parties concerned. She wore a tight-skirted 
black walking-dress, with a waist of perhaps carica- 
tured smallness ; her hat was full of red and yellow 
flowers ; on her hands, which were in drawing with 
her lips rather than her waist, were a pair of white 
kid gloves. As she advanced to take her place inside 



POLICE REPORT. 73 

the prisoner's bar slie gave in cliarge to a very mourn 
ful-looking elder of her race a little girl, two or three 
years of age, as fashionably dressed as herself, and 
tottering upon little high-heeled boots. The old man 
lifted the child in his arms, and funereally took his 
seat among the witnesses, while the culprit turned her 
full-blown smile upon the judge, and confidently 
pleaded not guilty to the clerk's reading of the indict- 
ment, in which she was charged with threatening the 
person and life of the plaintiff. At the same moment 
a sort of pleased expectation lighted up all those dull 
countenances in the court-room, which had been grow- 
ing more and more jaded under the process of the ac- 
cusations and condemnations. The soddenest habitue 
of the place brightened ; the lawyers and policemen 
eased themselves in their chairs, and I fancied that 
the judge himself relaxed. I could not refuse my 
sympathy to the general content ; I took another res- 
pite from the thought of my poor thief, and I too lent 
myself to the hope of enjoyment from this Laughable 
After-piece. 

The accuser also wore black, but her fashionable- 
ness, as compared with that of the defendant, was as 
the fashionableness of Boston to that of New York ; 
she had studied a subdued elegance, and she wore a 



74 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

crape veil instead of flowers on her hat. She was of a 
sort of dusky pallor, and her features had not the Con- 
goish fullness nor her skin the brilliancy of the defen- 
dant's. Her taste in kid gloves was a decorous black. 

She testified that she was employed as second-girl 
in a respectable family, and that the day before she 
had received a visit at the door from the defendant, 
who had invited her to come down the street to a cer- 
tain point, and be beaten within an inch of her life. 
On her failure to appear, the defendant came again, and 
notified her that she should hold the beating in store 
for her, and bestow it whenever she caught her out- 
of-doors. These visits and threats had terrified the 
plaintiff, and annoyed the respectable family with 
which she lived, and she had invoked the law. 

During the delivery of her complaint, the defen- 
dant had been lifting and lowering herself by the bar 
at which she stood, in anticipation of the judge's per- 
mission to question the plaintiff. At a nod from him 
she now flung herself half across it. 

" What'd I say I'd whip you /or?" 

The Plaintiff, thoughtfully : " What 'd you say you'd 
whip me for ? " 

The Defendant, beating the railing with her hand : 
"Yes, that's what I ast you; what/or.^" 



POLICE REPORT. 75 

The Plaintiffs witli dignity : " I don't know as you 
told me what for." 

The Defendant : " Now, now, none o' that ! You 
just answer my question." 

The Judge : '' She has answered it." 

The Defendant, after a moment of surprise : " Well, 
then, I'll ast her another question. Didn't I tell you 
if I ever caught you goin' to a ball with my husband 
ag'in I'd"— 

The Plaintiff: " I didn't go to no ball with your 
husband ! " 

The Defendant : " You didn't go with him ! Ah " — 

The Plaintiff: " I went with the crowd. I didn't 
know who I went with." 

The Defendant : " Well, I know who paid fifty 
cents for your ticket ! Why don't he give me any of 
his money? Hain't spent fifty cents on me or his 
child, there, since it was born. An' he goes with you 
all the time, — to church, and everywhere." 

The Judge : " That will do." 

The plaintiff, who had listened " with sick and 
scornful looks averse," stepped from the stand, and a 
dusky gentlewoman, as she looked, took her place, and 
corroborated her testimony. She also wore genteel 
black, and she haughtily turned from the defendant's 



76 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

splendors as she answered niucli the same questions 
that the latter had put to the plaintiff. She used her 
with the disdain that a lady who takes care of bank 
parlors may show to a social inferior with whom her 
grandson has been trapped into a distasteful marriage, 
and she expressed by a certain lift of the chin and a 
fall of the eyelids the absence of all quality in her 
granddaughter- in-law, as no words could have done it. 
I suppose it will be long before these poor creatures 
will cease to seem as if they were playing at our so- 
cial conditions, or the prejudices and passions when 
painted black will seem otherwise than funny. But 
if this old lady had been born a duchess, or the daugh- 
ter of a merchant one remove from retail trade, she 
could not have represented the unrelenting dowager 
more vividly. She bore witness to the blameless 
character of the plaintiff, to whom her grandson had 
paid only those attentions permissible from a gentle- 
man unhappy in his marriage, and living apart from 
his wife, — a wife, she insinuated, unworthy both be- 
fore and since the union which she had used sinister 
arts in forming with a family every way above her. 
She did not overdo the part, and she descended from 
the stand with the same hauteur toward the old man 
who succeeded her as she had shown his daughter. 



POLICE REPORT. 77- 

The hapless sire — for this was the character he at- 
tempted — came upon the stand with his forsaken 
grandchild in his arms, and bore his testimony to the 
fact that his daughter was a good girl, and had always 
done what was right, and had been brought up to it. 
He dwelt upon her fidelity to her virtuous family train- 
ing, with no apparent sense of incongruity in the facts 
— elicited by counsel — to the contrarj?^ ; and he was 
an old man whose perceptions were somewhat blunted 
as to other things. He maundered on about his son- 
in-law's neglect of his wife and child, and the expense 
which he had been put to on their account, and espe- 
cially about the wrongs his family had suffered since 
his son-in-law " got to going " with the plaintiff. 

" You say," interpreted the judge, " that the plain- 
tiff tried to seduce the affections of your daughter's 
husband from her ? " 

The old man was brought to a long and thoughtful 
pause, from which he was startled by a repetition of 
the judge's question. " I — I don' know as I under- 
stand you, judge," he faltered. 

" Do you mean that the plaintiff — the person whom 
your daughter threatened to beat — has been trying to 
get your daughter's husband's affections away from 
her ? " 



78 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

*' Why, lie liain't never showed her no affections, 
judge ! He's just left me to support her." 

" Very well, then. Has the plaintiff tried to get 
your daughter's husband away from her ? " 

" I guess not, judge. He hain't never took any no- 
tice of my daughter since he married her." 

" "Well, does your son-in-law go with this person ? " 

"With who, judge?" 

" With the plaintiff." 

" De ol' woman. No, he don' go wid de ol' woman 
any : she's his grari' mother. '''' 

" Well, docs he go with the young woman ? " 

" Oh, yes ! Yes ! He goes with the young woman. 
Goes with her all the time. That's the one he goes 
with ! " 

He seemed to be greatly surprised and delighted to 
find that this point was what the judge had been try- 
ing to get at, and the audience shared his pleasure. 

I really forget how the case was decided. Per- 
haps my train, which I began to be anxious not to 
lose, hurried me away before the denoumentj as often 
happens with the suburban play-goer. But to one 
who cares rather for character than for plot it made 
little difference. I came away thinking that if the 
actors in the little drama were of another complexion 



POLICE llEPORT. 79 

how finely the situation would have served in a certain 
sort of intense novel: the patrician dowager, inap- 
peasably offended by the low match her grandson has 
made, and willing to encourage his penchant for the 
lady of his own rank, whom some fortuity may yet 
enable him to marry ; the wife, with her vulgar but 
strong passions, stung to madness by the neglect and 
disdain of her husband's family, — it is certainly a very 
pretty intrigue, and I commend it to my brother (or 
sister) novelists who like to be praised by the review- 
ers for what the reviewers think profundity and power. 

VIII. 

It was nearly a year later that I paid my second 
visit to the police court, on a day, like the first, humid 
and dull, but very close and suffocatingly hot. It was 
a Monday morning, and there was a full dock, as I 
have learned that the prisoner's pen at the right of the 
clerk's desk is called. The clerk was standing with 
that sheaf of indictments in his hand, and saying, 
" John O'Brien ! " and John O'Brien was answering, 
"Here, sor!" and the clerk was proceeding, "Com- 
plained of for being drunk guilty or not guilty pay a 
fine of one dollar and costs stand committed to the 
House of Industry," and then writing on the indict- 



80 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

ment, and tossing it aside. As I modestly took my 
stand at the door, till I sliould gather courage to cross 
the room to one of the vacant seats which I saw among 
the policemen, one of these officers of the court ap- 
proached me and said, *' No room for you here to-day, 
my friend. Go up on the Common." In spite of my 
share of that purely American vanity which delights 
in official recognition, I could not be flattered at this, 
and it was with relief that I found he was addressing 
a fellow-habitue behind me. The court-room was in 
fact very full, and there were no seats on the benches 
ordinarily allotted to spectators ; so I at once crossed 
to my place, and sat down among the policemen, to 
whom I authorized my intrusion by taking my note- 
book from my pocket. I have some hopes that the 
spectators thought me a detective in plain clothes, and 
revered me accordingly. There was such a person 
near me, with his club sticking out of his back-pocket, 
whom I am sure / revered. 

I had not come to report the events of this session 
of the court, but to refresh the impressions of ray first 
visit, and I was glad to find them so just. There was, 
of course, some little change ; but the same magistrate 
was there, serene, patient, mercifully inclined of vis- 
age; the colored attorney was there, in charge, as 



POLICE REPORT. 81 

before, of a disastrous Irish case. The ojQficials who 
tried to keep order had put off their flannel coats for 
coats of seersucker, and each carried a Japanese fan ; 
neither wore a collar, now, and I fancied them both a 
little more in flesh. I think they were even less suc- 
cessful than formerly in quelling disturbances, though 
they were even more polished in the terms of their 
appeal. " Too much conversation in the court ! " they 
called out to us collectively. " Conversation must 
cease," they added. Then one, walking up to a bench- 
f ul of voluble witnesses, would say, " Must cease that 
conversation," and to my fellow-policemen, " Less 
conversation, gentlemen ; " then again to the room at 
large, " Stop all conversation in the court," and " All 
conversation must cease entirely." 

The Irish case, which presently came on, was a 
question of assault and battery between Mrs. O'Hara 
and Mrs. MacMannis ; it had finally to be dismissed, 
after much testimony to the guilt and peaceable char- 
acter of both parties. A dozen or more witnesses, 
were called, principally young girls, who had come in 
their best, and with whom one could fancy this an 
occasion of present satisfying excitement and future 
celebrity. The witnesses were generally more inter- 
esting than the parties to the suits, I thought, and I 
F 



82 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

could not get tired of my fellow-spectators, I suppose, 
if I went a great many times. I liked to consider the 
hungry gravity of their countenances, as they listened 
to the facts elicited, and to speculate as to the ulti- 
mate efEect upon their moral natures — or their im- 
moral natures — of the gross and palpable shocks daily 
imparted to them by the details of vice and crime. I 
have tried to treat my material lightly and entertain- 
ingly, as a true reporter should, but I would not have 
my reader suppose that I did not feel the essential 
cruelty of an exhibition that tore its poor rags from 
all that squalid shame, and its mask from all that lying, 
cowering guilt, or did not suspect how it must harden 
and deprave those whom it daily entertained. As I 
dwelt upon the dull visages of the spectators, certain 
spectacles vaguely related themselves to what I saw : 
the women who sat and knitted at the sessions of the 
Revolutionary tribunals of Paris, and overwhelmed 
with their clamor the judges' feeble impulses to mer- 
cy ; the roaring populace at the Spanish bull-fight and 
the Roman arena. Here the same elements were held 
in absolute silence, — debarred even from " conversa- 
tion," — but it was impossible not to feel that here in 
degree were the conditions that trained men to de- 
mand blood, to rave for the guillotine, to turn down 



POLICE REPORT. 83 

the thumb. This procession of misdeeds, passing un- 
der their eyes day after day, must leave a miasm of 
moral death behind it which no prison or work-house 
can hereafter cure. We all know that the genius of 
our law is publicity ; but it may be questioned whether 
criminal trials may not be as profitably kept private as 
hangings, the popular attendance on which was once 
supposed to be a bulwark of religion and morality. 

IX. 

Not that there was any avoidable brutality, or even 
indecorum, in the conduct of the trials that I saw. A 
spade was necessarily called a spade ; but it seemed to 
me that with all the lapse of time and foreign alloy 
the old Puritan seriousness was making itself felt even 
here, and subduing the tone of the procedure to a 
grave decency consonant with the inquiries of justice. 
For it was really justice that was administered, so far 
as I could see; and justice that was by no means 
blind, but very open-eyed and keen-sighted. The 
causes were decided by one man, from evidence usu- 
ally extracted out of writhing reluctance or abysmal 
stupidity, and the judgment must be formed and the 
sentence given where the magistrate sat, amid the con- 
fusion of the crowded room. Yet, except in the case 



84 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

of my poor thief, I did not see tim hesitate ; and I 
did not doubt his wisdom even in that case. His de- 
cisions seemed to me the result of most patient and 
wonderfully rapid cogitation, and in dealing with the 
witnesses he never lost his temper amid densities of 
dullness which it is quite impossible to do more than 
indicate. If it were necessary, for example, to estab- 
lish the fact that a handkerchief was white, it was not 
to be done without some such colloquy as this : — 

" Was it a white handkerchief? " 

"Sor?" 

" Was the handkerchief white ? " 

"Was it white, sor?" 

" Yes, was it white ? " 

" Was what white, sor ? " 

" The handkerchief, — was the handkerchief white ?" 

"What handkerchief, sor?" 

" The handkerchief you just mentioned, — the hand- 
kerchief that the defendant dropped." 

" I didn't see it, sor." " 

" Didn't see the handkerchief? " 

" Didn't see him drop it, sor." 

"Well, did you see the handkerchief? " 

" The handkerchief, sor ? Oh, yes, sor ! I saw it, 
— I saw the handkerchief.'''' 



POLICE REPORT. 85 

" Well, was it white ? " 

" It was, sor." 

A boy wlio complained of another for assaulting him 
said that he knocked him down. 

" How did he knock you down ? " asked the judge. 
"Did he knock you down with his fist or his open 
hand ? " 

" Yes, sor." 

" Which did he do it with ? " 

" Put his arms round me and knocked me down," 

" Then he didn't hnocTc you down. He threw you 
down." 

" Yes, sor. He didn't t'row me down. Put his 
arms round me and knocked me down." 

It would be impossible to caricature these things, 
or to exaggerate the charitable long-suffering that dealt 
with such cases. Sometimes, as if in mere despair, 
the judge called the parties to him, and questioned 
them privately ; after which the case seemed to be set- 
tled, without further trial. 

X. 

I have spoken of the theatrical illusion which the 
proceedings of the court produced ; but it often seemed 
to me also like a school where bad boys and girls were 



86 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

brought up for punisliment. They were, indeed, like 
children, those poor offenders, and had a sort of inno- 
cent simplicity in their wickedness, as good people 
have in their goodness. One case came up on the 
occasion of my last visit, which I should like to report 
verbatim in illustration, but it was of too lurid a sort 
to be treated by native realism ; we can only bear that 
sort when imported ; and undoubtedly there is some- 
thing still to be said in behalf of decency, at least in 
the English language. 1 can only hint that this case 
was one which in some form or other has been coming 
up in the police courts ever since police courts began. 
It must have been familiar to those of Thebes three 
thousand years ago, and will be so in those of cities 
which shall look back on Boston in an antiquity as 
hoary. A hard-working old fool with a month's pay 
in his pocket and the lost soul with whom he carouses ; 
the theft; the quarrel between the lost soul and the 
yet more fallen spirit who harbored her and traded at 
second hand in her perdition as to who stole the fool's 
money, — what stale materials! Yet I was as much 
interested as if this were the first case of the kind, 
and, confronted with the fool and the lost soul and 
the yet more fallen spirit, I could not feel that they 
were — let me say it in all seriousness and reverence — 



POLICE REPORT. 87 

SO very bad. Perhaps it was because they stood there 
reduced to the very nakedness of their shame, and 
confessedly guilty in what human nature struggles to 
the last to deny — stood there, as a premise, far past 
the hope of lying — that they seemed rather subjects 
for pity than abhorrence. The fool and the lost soul 
were light and trivial ; they even laughed at some of 
the grosser facts ; but that yet more fallen spirit was 
ghastly tragical, as bit by bit the confession of her 
business was torn from her ; it was torture that seemed 
hideously out of proportion to any end to be attained ; 
yet as things are it had to be. If then and there some 
sort of redemption might have begun ! 

The divine life which is in these poor creatures, as 
in the best and purest, seemed to be struggling back 
to some relation and likeness to our average sinful 
humanity, insisting that if socially and publicly we 
denied it we should not hold it wholly outcast in our 
secret hearts, nor refuse it our sympathy. Seeing that 
on their hopelessly sunken level their common human- 
ity kept that symmetry and proportion Avhich physical 
deformity shows, one could not doubt that a distorted 
kindliness and good-nature remained to them in the 
midst of their depravity : the man was like a gray- 
headed foolish boy ; the two women as simple and 



88 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

cunning as too nauglity children. It could be imag- 
ined that they had their friendly moments; that in 
extremity they might care for each other ; that even 
such a life as theirs had its reliefs from perdition, as 
in disease there is relief from pain, and no suffering, 
out of romance, is incessant. They had certainly their 
decorums, their criterions. On their plane, everything 
but the theft and the noisy quarrel was of custom and 
for granted ; but these were misdemeanors and dis- 
graceful. Like another hostess of the sort, the fallen 
spirit was aggrieved at these. " Do you think I keep 
thieves in my house ? . . . The tithe of a hair was 
never lost in my house before. . . . I'll no swaggerers. 
. . . There comes no swaggering here. ... I will 
bar no honest man my house, nor no cheater ; but I do 
not love swaggering." This is the sum of what she 
said that she had said in rebuke of the lost soul ; that 
thieving and that swaggering, they incensed her, and 
roused in her all the instints of a moral and respect- 
able person. Humanity adjusts itself to all conditions, 
and doubtless God forsakes it in none, but still shapes 
it to some semblance of health in its sickness, of order 
in its disorder, of righteousness in its sin. 

I dare say that it was not a wholesome feeling, this 
leniency that acquaintance with sinners produces. 



POLICE REPORT. 89 

There is much to be urged on that side, and I would 
like to urge it in considering the effect of daily attend- 
ance at the police court upon these spectators whom 
I have tried to study for the reader's advantage. I 
must own that the trial at which I have hinted did not 
affect them seriously, and I doubt if they psychologized 
upon it. They craned their necks forward and gloated 
on those women with an unmistakably obscene delight. 
If they were not beyond being the worse for anything, 
they were the worse for that trial. Why were they 
present? Theoretically, perhaps to see that justice 
was done. But if justice had not been done, how 
could they have helped it ? The public shame seemed 
purely depraving both to those who suffered it and to 
those who saw it ; and it ought to have been no part 
of the punishment inflicted. It was horrible, and it 
sometimes befell those who were accused of nothing, 
but were merely there to be tortured as witnesses. 
The lawyer who forced that wretched hostess to confess 
the character of her house used no unfair means, and 
he dealt with her as sparingly as he might ; yet it was 
still a shocking spectacle ; for she was, curiously 
enough, not lost to shame, but most alive to it, and, 
standing there before that brutal crowd, gave up her 
name to infamy, with atrocious pain and hate ; her 



90 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

face was such a visage as hell-fire might flash into 
sight among the newly damned, but such as our fa- 
miliar and respectable sunlight would do well not to 
reveal to any eyes but magistrates' and priests'. Till 
one has seen such a thing it is incredible that it should 
be, and then incredible that it should possibly be of 
daily occurrence. It was as if the physicians in charge 
of a public hospital should permit that rabble to be 
present at a clinique for some loathsome disease, to 
see that there was no malpractice. If the Avhole trial 
could have taken place with closed doors, and with 
none present but the parties, the lawyers, and the 
court, what possible harm could have been done ? I 
think none whatever, and I am so sure of this that I 
would not only have all the police trials secret, but I 
would never have another police report in print — after 
this! Then the decency of mystery, and perhaps 
something of its awe, would surround the vulgar shame 
and terror of the police court, and a system which 
does no good would at least do less harm thai} at 

present. 

XL 

It will be perceived that, like all reformers, I am go- 
ing too far. I begin with demanding secrecy in police 
trials, and I end by suggesting that they be abolished 



POLICE REPORT. 91 

altogether. But in fact nothing struck me more for- 
cibly in the proceedings of the police court than their 
apparent futility. It was all a mere suppression of 
symptoms in the vicious classes, not a cure. This one 
or that one would not steal, or assault and batter, for 
the given term of his imprisonment, but this was ludi- 
crously far from touching even the tendency to theft 
and violence. These bad boys and girls came up and 
had their thrashing or their rap over the knuckles, and 
were practically bidden by the conditions of our civil- 
ization to go and sin some more. Perhaps there is no 
cure for vice and crime. Perhaps there is nothing 
but prevention, in the application of which there is al- 
ways difficulty, obscurity, and uncertainty. 

The other day, as I passed the court-house, that sad 
vehicle which is called the Black Maria was driving 
away from the high portal into which it backs to re- 
ceive its dead. (The word came inevitably ; it is not 
so far wrong, and it may stand.) The Black Maria 
may still be Maria (the reason why it should ever have 
been I do not know), but it is black no longer. On 
the contrary, it is painted a not uncheerful salmon 
color, with its false sash picked out in drab ; and at 
first glance, among the rattling" express wagons, it 
looked not unlike an omnibus of the living, and could 



92 IMPRESSIONS AND E2EPE.IBNCES. 

have passed througli the street without making the 
casual observer realize what a dreary hearse it was. I 
dare say it was on its way to the House of Industry, 
or the House of Correction, or Deer Island, or some 
of those places where people are put to go from bad 
to worse ; and it was fulfilling its function with a mer- 
ciful privacy, for its load of convicts might have been 
dragged through the streets on open hurdles, for the 
further edification of the populace. Yet I could not 
help thinking — or perhaps the thought only occurs to 
me now — that for all reasonable hope as to the future 
of its inmates the Black Maria might as well have been 
fitted with one of those ingenious pieces of mechanism 
sometimes employed by the Enemies of Society, and 
driven out to some wide, open space where the explo- 
sion could do no harm to the vicinity, and so when 
the horses and driver had removed to a safe distance — 

But this is perhaps pessimism. 

It is very hard to say what pessimism really is, and 
almost any honest expression concerning the monoto- 
nous endeavor and failure of society to repress the 
monotonous evolution of the criminal in conditions 
that render his evolution inevitable, must seem pessi- 
mistic. I do not suppose that we ought to kill him 
merely because we cannot hope to cure him, though 



POLICE KErORT. 93 

society goes to this extreme in certain extreme cases. 
Is it right to kill the criminal at one stage of his ca- 
reer, and not at another ? After the first conviction 
the rest is inevitable, and each succeeding conviction 
follows as a matter of course. A bleaker pessimist 
than myself might say that all criminal courts seem to 
be part of the process in the evolution of the criminal. 
Still, criminal courts must be. 



I TALK OF DREAMS. 

But it is mostly my own dreams I talk of, and that 
will somewhat excuse me for talking of dreams at all. 
Every one knows how delightful the dreams are that 
one dreams one's self, and how insipid the dreams of 
others are. I had an illustration of the fact, not many 
evenings ago, when a company of us got telling 
dreams. I had by far the best dreams of any ; to be 
quite frank, mine were the only dreams worth listening 
to ; they were richly imaginative, delicately fantastic, 
exquisitely whimsical, and humorous in the last de- 
gree ; and I wondered that when the rest could have 
listened to them they were always eager to cut in 
with some silly, senseless, tasteless thing, that made 
me sorry and ashamed for them. I shall not be going 
too far if I say that it was on their part the grossest 
betrayal of vanity that I ever witnessed. 

But the egotism of some people concerning their 
dreams is almost incredible. They will come down to 



I TALK OF DREAMS. 95 

breakfast and bore everybody witb a recital of the non- 
sense tbat bas passed tbrougb tbeir brains in sleep, as 
if tbey were not bad enougb wben they were awake ; 
they will not spare tbe slightest detail ; and if, by the 
mercy of Heaven, tbey have forgotten something, they 
will be sure to recollect it, and go back and give it all 
over again with added circumstance. Such people do 
not reflect that there is something so purely and in- 
tensely personal in dreams that they can rarely interest 
any one but the dreamer, and that to the dearest 
friend, the closest relation or connection, they can sel- 
dom be otherwise than tedious and impertinent. The 
habit husbands and wives have of making one another 
listen to their dreams is especially cruel. They have 
each other quite helpless, and for this reason they 
should all the more carefully guard themselves from 
abusing their advantage. Parents should not afflict 
their offspring with the rehearsal of their mental 
maunderings in sleep, and children should learn that 
one of the first duties a child owes its parents is to 
spare them the anguish of hearing what it has dreamed 
about overnight. A like forbearance in regard to the 
community at large should be taught as the first trait 
of good manners in the public schools, if we ever 
come to teach good manners there. 



96 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

I. 

Certain exceptional dreams, however, are so im- 
peratively significant, so vitally important, that it 
would be wrong to withhold them from the knowledge 
of those who happened not to dream them, and I feel 
some such quality in my own dreams so strongly that 
I could scarcely forgive myself if I did not, however 
briefly, impart them. It was only the last week, for 
instance, that I found myself one night in the com- 
pany of the Duke of Wellington, the great Duke, the 
Iron one, in fact ; and after a few moments of agree- 
able conversation on topics of interest among gentle- 
men, his Grace said that now, if I pleased, he would 
like a couple of those towels. We had not been 
speaking of towels, that I remember, but it seemed 
the most natural thing in the world that he should 
mention them in the connection, whatever it was, and 
I went at once to get them for him. At the place 
where they gave out towels, and where I found some 
very civil people, they told me that what I wanted was 
not towels, and they gave me instead two bath-gowns, 
of rather scanty measure, butternut in color and Turk- 
ish in texture. The garments made somehow a very 
strong impression upon me, so that I could draw them 
now, if I could draw anything, as they looked when 



I TALK OF DREAMS. 97 

they were held up -to me. At tlie same moment, for 
no reason that I can allege, I passed from a social to 
a menial relation to the Duke, and foresaw that when 
I went back to him with these bath-gowns he would 
not thank me as one gentleman would another, but 
would ofEer me a tip as if I were a servant. This gave 
me no trouble, for I at once dramatized a little scene 
between myself and the Duke, in which I should bring 
him the bath-gowns, and he should offer me the tip, 
and I should refuse it with a low bow, and say that I 
was an American. What I did not dramatize, or what 
seemed to enter into the dialogue quite without my 
agency, was the Duke's reply to my proud speech. It 
was foreshown me that he would say. He did not see 
why that should make any difference. I suppose it 
was in the hurt I felt at this wound to our national 
dignity that I now instantly invented the society of 
some ladies, whom I told of my business with those 
bath -gowns (I still had them in my hands), and urged 
them to go with me and call upon the Duke. They 
expressed, somehow, that they would rather not, and 
then I urged that the Duke was very handsome. This 
seemed to end the whole affair, and I passed on to 
other visions, which I cannot recall. 

I have not often had a dream of such international 
G 



98 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

import, in the offence offered, througli me to the Amer- 
ican character, and its well-known superiority to tips, 
but I have had others quite as humiliating to me 
personally. In fact, I am rather in the habit of hav- 
ing such dreams, and I think 1 may not unjustly at- 
tribute to them the disciplined modesty which the 
reader will hardly fail to detect in the present essay. 
It has more than once been my fate to find myself 
during sleep in battle, where I behave with so little 
courage as to bring discredit upon our flag and shame 
upon myself. In these circumstances I am not anxious 
to make even a showing of courage ; my one thought 
is to get away as rapidly and safely as possible. It is 
said that this is really the wish of all novices under 
fire, and that the difference between a hero and a cow- 
ard is that the hero hides it, with a duplicity which 
finally does him honor, and that the coward frankly 
runs away. I have never really been in battle, and if 
it is anything like a battle in dreams, I Avould not will- 
ingly qualify myself to speak by the card on this 
point. Neither have I ever really been upon the stage, 
but in dreams I have often been there, and always in 
a great trouble of mind at not knowing my part. It 
seems a little odd that I should not sometimes be pre- 
pared, but I never am, and I feel that when the curtain 



I TALK OF DREAMS. 99 

rises I shall be disgraced beyond all reprieve. I dare 
say it is the suffering from this that awakens me in 
time, or changes the current of my dreams so that I 
have never yet been actually hooted from the stage. 

II. 

But I do not so much object to these ordeals as to 
some social experiences which I have in dreams. I 
cannot understand why one should dream of being 
slighted or snubbed in society, but this is Avhat I have 
done more than once, though never perhaps so signally 
as in the instance I am about to give. I found myself 
in a large room, Avhere people were sitting at lunch or 
supper around small tables, as is the custom, I am told, 
at parties in the houses of our nobility and gentry. I 
was feeling very well; not too proud, I hope, but in 
harmony with the time and place. I was very well 
dressed, for me ; and as I stood talking to some ladies 
at one of the tables I was saying some rather brilliant 
things, for me ; I lounged easily on one foot, as I have 
observed men of fashion do, and as I talked, I flipped 
my gloves, which I held in one hand, across the other ; 
I remember thinking that this was a peculiarly dis- 
tinguished action. Upon the whole I comported my- 
self like one in the habit of such affairs, and I turned 



100 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

to walk away to another table, very well satisfied witli 
myself and witli the effect of my splendor upon the 
ladies. But I had got only a few paces ofE when I 
perceived (I could not see with my back turned) one 
of the ladies lean forward, and heard her say to the 
rest in a tone of killing condescension and patronage, 
" / don't see why that person isn't as well as another." 
I say that I do not like this sort of dreams, and I 
never would have them if I could help. They make 
me ask myself if I am really such a snob when I am 
waking, and this in itself is very unpleasant. If I am, 
I cannot help hoping that it will not be found out ; 
and in my dreams I am always less sorry for the 
misdeeds I commit than for their possible discovery. 
I have done some very bad things in dreams which I 
have no concern for whatever, except as they seem to 
threaten me with publicity, or bring me within the 
penalty of the law ; and I believe this is the attitude 
of most other criminals, remorse being a fiction of the 
poets, according to the students of the criminal class. 
It is not agreeable to bring this home to one's self, 
but the fact is not without its significance in another 
direction. It implies that both in the case of the 
dream -criminal and the deed-criminal there is perhaps 
the same taint of insanity ; only, in the deed-criminal 



I TALK OF DREAMS. 101 

it is active, and ili the dream-criminal it is passive. 
In both, the inhibitory clause that forbids evil is off, 
but the dreamer is not bidden to do evil as the maniac 
is, or as the malefactor often seems to be. The dream- 
er is purely unmoral ; good and bad are the same to 
his conscience ; he has no more to do with right and 
wrong than the animals ; he is reduced to the state of 
the merely natural man ; and perhaps the primitive 
men were really like what we all are now in our 
dreams. Perhaps all life to them was merely dream- 
ing, and they never had anything like our waking 
consciousness, which seems to be the offspring of con- 
science, or else the parent of it. Until men passed 
the first stage of being, perhaps that which we call the 
soul, for want of a better name, or a worse, could 
hardly have existed, and perhaps in dreams the soul 
is mostly absent now. The soul, or the principle that 
we call the soul, is the supernal criticism of the deeds 
done in the body, which goes perpetually on in the 
waking mind. While this watches, and warns or com- 
mands, we go right ; but when it is off duty we go 
neither right nor wrong, but are as the beasts that 
perish. 

A common theory is that the dreams which we re- 
member are those we have in the drowse which pre- 



102 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPEKIENCES. 

cedes sleeping and waking; but I do not altogether 
accept this theory. In fact, there is very little proof 
of it. We often wake from a dream, literally, but 
there is no proof that we did not dream in the middle 
of the night the dream which is quite as vividly with 
us in the morning as the one we wake from. I should 
think that the dream which has some color of con- 
science in it was the drowse-dream, and that the dream 
which has none is the sleep-dream ; and I believe that 
the most of our dreams will be found by this test to 
be sleep-dreams. It is in these we may know what 
we would be without our souls, without their supernal 
criticism of the mind ; for the mind keeps on working 
in them, with the lights of waking knowledge, both 
experience and observation, but ruthlessly, remorse- 
lessly. By them we may know what the state of the 
habitual criminal is, what the state of the lunatic, the 
animal, the devil is. In them the personal character 
ceases ; the dreamer is remanded to his type. 

III. 

It is very strange, in the matter of dreadful dreams, 
how the body of the terror is, in the course of often 
dreaming, reduced to a mere convention. For a long 
time I was tormented with a nightmare of burglars, 



I TALK OF DEEAMS. 103 

and at first I used to dramatize the whole afEair in de- 
tail, from the time the burglars approached the house, 
till they mounted the stairs, and the light of their 
dark-lanterns shone under the door into my room. 
Now I have blue-pencilled all that introductory detail ; 
I have a light shining in under my door at once ; I 
know that it is my old burglars ; and I have the effect 
of nightmare without further ceremony. There are 
other nightmares that still cost me a great deal of 
trouble in their construction, as for instance the night- 
mare of clinging to the face of a precipice or the eaves 
of a lofty building ; I have to take as much pains with 
the arrangement of these as if I were now dreaming 
them for the first time, and were hardly more than an 
apprentice in the business. 

Perhaps the most universal dream of all is that dis- 
graceful dream of appearing in public places, and in 
society, with very little or nothing on. This dream 
spares neither age nor sex, I believe, and I dare say 
the innocency of wordless infancy is abused by it, 
and dotage pursued to the tomb. I have not the least 
doubt Adam and Eve had it in Eden ; though up to 
the moment the fig-leaf came in, it is difficult to imag- 
ine just what plight they found themselves in that 
seemed improper; probably there was some plight. 



104: IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

The most amusing thing about this dream is the sort 
of defensive process that goes on in the mind, in search 
of self-justification or explanation. Is there not some 
peculiar circumstance or special condition, in whose 
virtue it is wholly right and proper for one to come 
to a fashionable assembly clad simply in a towel, or 
to go about the street in nothing but a pair of kid 
gloves, or of pyjamas at the most ? This, or something 
like it, the mind of the dreamer struggles to establish, 
with a good deal of anxious appeal to the bystanders 
and a final sense of the hopelessness of the cause. 

One may easily laugh off this sort of dream in the 
morning, but there are other shameful dreams, whose 
inculpation projects itself far into the day, and whose 
infamy often lingers about one till lunch-time. Every 
one, nearly, has had them, but it is not the kind of 
dream that any one is fond of telling : the gross vanity 
of the most besotted dream-teller keeps that sort back. 
During the forenoon, at least, the victim goes about 
with the dim question whether he is not really that 
kind of man harassing him, and a sort of remote fear 
that he may be. I fancy that as to his nature and as 
to his mind, he is so, and that but for the supernal 
criticism, but for his soul, he might be that kind of 
man in very act and deed. 



I TALK OF DREAMS 105 

The dreams we sometimes have about other people 
are not without a curious suggestion ; and the super- 
stitious (of those superstitious who like to invent their 
own superstitions) might very well imagine that the 
persons dreamed of had a witting complicity in their 
facts, as well as the dreamer. This is a conjecture 
that must of course not he forced to any conclusion. 
One must not go to one of these persons and ask, 
however much one would like to ask, " Sir, have you 
no recollection of such and such a thing, at such and 
such a time and place, which happened to us in my 
dream ? " Any such person would be fully justified 
in not answering the question. It would be, of all 
interviewing, the most intolerable species. Yet a sin- 
gular interest, a curiosity not altogether indefensible, 
will attach to these persons in the dreamer's mind, and 
he will not be without the sense, ever after, that he 
and they have a secret in common. This is dreadful, 
but the only thing that I can think to do about it is 
to urge people to keep out of other people's dreams 
by every means in their power. 

IV. 

There are things in dreams very awful, which would 
not be at all so in waking ; quite witless and aimless 



106 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

things, which at the time were of such baleful effect 
that it remains forever. I remember dreaming when 
I was quite a small boy, not more than ten years old, 
a dream which is vivider in my mind now than any- 
thing that happened at the time. I suppose it came 
remotely from my reading of certain Tales of the Gro- 
tesque and the Arabesque, which had just then fallen 
into my hands ; and it involved simply an action of the 
fire-company in the little town where I lived. They 
were working the brakes of the old fire-engine, which 
would seldom respond to their efforts, and as their 
hands rose and fell they set up the heart-shaking and 
soul-desolating cry of " Arms Poe, arms Poe, arms 
Poe ! " This and nothing more was the body of my 
horror ; and if the reader is not moved by it the fault 
is his and not mine ; for I can assure him that nothing 
in my experience has been more dreadful to me. 

I can hardly except the dismaying apparition of a 
clown, whom I once saw, somewhat later in life, rise 
through the air in a sitting posture, and float lightly 
over the house-roof, snapping his fingers, and vaguely 
smiling, while the antennae on his forehead, which 
clowns have in common with some other insects, nod- 
ded elastically. I do not know why this portent 
should have been so terrifying, or indeed that it was a 



I TALK OF DREAMS. 107 

portent at all, for' nothing ever came of it; what I 
knoAv is that it was to the last degree threatening and 
awful. I never got anything but joy out of the cir- 
cuses where this dream must have originated, but the 
pantomime of Don Giovanni, which I saw at the thea- 
tre, was as grewsome to me waking as it was to me 
dreaming. The statue of the Commendatore, in getting 
down from his horse to pursue the wicked hero (I 
think that is what he gets down for), set an example 
by which a long line of statues afterwards profited in 
my dreams. For many years, and I do not know but 
quite up to the time when I adopted burglars as the 
theme of my nightmares, I was almost always chased 
by a marble statue with an uplifted arm, and almost 
always I ran along the verge of a pond to escape it. 
I believe that I got this pond out of my remote child- 
hood, and that it may have been a fish-pond embow- 
ered by weeping-willows whicli I used to admire in the 
door-yard of a neighbor. I have somehow a greater 
respect for the material of this earlier nightmare than 
I have for that of the later ones, and no doubt the 
reader will agree with me that it is much more roman- 
tic to be pursued by a statue than to be threatened by 
burglars. It is but a few hours ago, however, that I 
saved myself from these inveterate enemies by waking 



108 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

up just in time for breakfast. They did not come 
witli tliat light of dark-lanterns shining under the 
door, or I should have known them at once, and not 
had so much bother ; but they intimated their presence 
in the catch of the lock, which would not close secure- 
ly, and there was some question at first whether they 
were not ghosts. I thought of tying the door-knob 
on the inside of my room to my bedpost (a bedpost 
that has not been in existence for fifty years), but 
after suffering awhile I decided to speak to them from 
an upper window. By this time they had turned into 
a trio of harmless, necessary tramps, and at my appeal 
to them, absolutely nonsensical as I now believe it to 
have been, to regard the peculiar circumstances, what- 
ever they were or were not, they did really get up 
from the back porch where they were seated and go 
quietly away. 

Burglars are not always so easily to be entreated. 
On one occasion, when I found a party of them dig- 
ging at the corner of my house on Concord Avenue in 
Cambridge, and opened the window over them to ex- 
postulate, the leader looked up at me in well-affected 
surprise. He lifted his hand, with a twenty-dollar 
note in it, toward me, and said: "Oh! Can you 
change me a twenty-dollar bill ? " I expressed a polite 



I TALK OF DREAMS. 109 

regret that I had n-ot so mucli money about me, and 
then he said to the rest, " Go ahead, boys," and they 
went on undermining my house. I do not know what 
came of it all. 

Of ghosts I have seldom dreamed, so far as I can 
remember ; in fact, I have never dreamed of the kind 
of ghosts that we are all more or less afraid of, though 
I have dreamed rather often of the spirits of departed 
friends. But I once dreamed of dying, and the read- 
er, who has never died yet, may be interested to know 
what it is like. According to this experience of mine, 
which I do not claim is typical, it is like a fire kindling 
in an air-tight stove with paper and shavings; the 
gathering smoke and gases suddenly burst into flame, 
and pufE the door out, and all is over. 

I have not yet been led to execution for the many 
crimes I have committed in my dreams, but I was 
once in the hands of a barber, who added to the shav- 
ing and shampooing business the art of removing his 
customers' heads in treatment for headache. As I 
took my seat in his chair I had some lingering doubts 
as to the effect of a treatment so drastic, and I vent- 
ured to mention the case of a friend of mine, a gen- 
tleman somewhat eminent in the law, who after several 
weeks was still going about without his head. The 



110 IMPKESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

barber did not attempt to refute my position. He 
merely said, " Oli, well, he bad such a very thicfe sort 
of a head, anyway." 

This was a sarcasm, but I think it was urged as a 
reason, though it may not have been. We rarely bring 
away from sleep the things that seem so brilliant to us 
in our dreams. Verse is especially apt to fade away, 
or turn into doggerel in the memory, and the witty 
sayings which wc contrive to remember will hardly 
bear the test of daylight. The most perfect thing of 
the kind out of my own dreams was something that I 
seemed to wake with the very sound of in my ears. 
It was after a certain dinner, which had been rather 
uncommonly gay, with a good deal of very good talk, 
which seemed to go on all night, and when I woke in 
the morning some one was saying, " Oh, I shouldn't 
at all mind his robbing Peter to pay Paul, if I felt 
sure that Paul would get the money." This I think 
really humorous, and an extremely neat bit of charac- 
terization ; I feel free to praise it, because it was not 
I who said it. 

V. 

Apparently the greater part of dreams have no 
more mirth than sense in them. This is perhaps be- 
cause the man is in dreams reduced to the brute con- 



i 



I TALK OF DREAMS. Ill 

dition, and is the lawless inferior of the waking man 
intellectually, as the lawless in waking are always the 
inferiors of the lawful. Some loose thinkers suppose 
that if we give the rein to imagination it will do great 
things, but it will really do little things, foolish and 
worthless things, as we witness in dreams, where it is 
quite unbridled. It must keep close to truth, and it 
must be under the law if it would work strongly and 
sanely. The man in his dreams is really lower than 
the lunatic in his deliriums. These have a logic of 
their own ; but the dreamer has not even a crazy logic, 

" Like a dog, he hunts in dreams," 
and probably his dreams and the dog's are not only 
alike, but are of the same quality. In his wicked 
dreams the man is not only animal, he is devil, so 
wholly is he let into his evils, as the Swedenborgians 
say. The wrong is indifferent to him until the fear of 
detection and punishment steals in upon him. Even 
then he is not sorry for his misdeed, as I have said 
before ; he is only anxious to escape its consequences. 
It seems probable that when this fear makes itself 
felt he is near to waking ; and probably when we 
dream, as we often do, that the thing is only a dream, 
and hope for rescue from it by waking, we are always 
just about to wake. This double effect is very strange, 



112 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

but still more strange is tlie effect which we are privy 
to in the minds of others, when they not merely say 
things to us which are wholly unexpected, but think 
things that we know they are thinking, and that they 
do not express in words. A great many years ago, 
when I was young, I dreamed that my father, who was 
in another town, came into the room where I was really 
lying asleep, and stood by my bed. He wished to 
greet me, after our separation, but he reasoned that if 
he did so, I should wake, and he turned and left the 
room without touching me. This process in his mind, 
which I knew as clearly and accurately as if it had 
apparently gone on in my own, was apparently con- 
fined to his mind as absolutely as anything could be 
that was not spoken or in any wise uttered. 

Of course it was of my agency, like any other part 
of the dream, and it was something like the operation 
of the novelist's intention through the mind of his 
characters. But in this there is the author's con- 
sciousness that he is doing it all himself, while in my 
dream, this reasoning in the mind of another was 
something that I felt myself mere witness of. In fact 
there is no analogy, so far as I can make out, between 
the process of literary invention and the process of 
dreaming. In the invention, the critical faculty is 



I TALK OF DKEAMS. 113 

vividly and constantly alert ; in dreaming, it seems al- 
together absent. It seems absent, too, in what we call 
day-dreaming, or that sort of dramatizing action which 
perhaps goes on perpetually in the mind, or some 
minds. But this day-dreaming is not otherwise any 
more like night-dreaming than invention is ; for the 
man is never more actively and consciously a man, and 
never has a greater will to be fine and high and grand 
than in his day-dreams, while in his night-dreams he 
is quite willing to be a miscreant of any worst sort. 

It is very remarkable, in view of this fact, that we 
have now and then, though ever so much more rarely, 
dreams that arc as angelic as those others are demo- 
niac. Is it possible that then the dreamer is let into 
his goods (the word is Swedenborg's again), instead 
of his evils ? It may be supposed that in sleep the 
dreamer lies passive, while his proper soul is away, and 
other spirits, celestial and infernal, have free access to 
his mind, and abuse it to their own ends in the one 
case, and use it in his behalf in the other. 

That would be an explanation, but nothing seems 
quite to hold in regard to dreams. If it is true, why 
should the dreamer's state so much oftener be imbued 
with evil than with good ? It might be answered that 
the evil forces are much more positive and aggressive 
H 



114 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

than the good ; or, that the love of the dreamer, which 
is his life, being mainly evil, invites the wicked spirits 
oftener. But that is a point which I would rather 
leave each dreamer to settle for himself. The greater 
number of every one's dreams, like the romantic novel, 
I fancy, concern incident rather than character, and I 
am not sure, after all, that the dream which convicts 
the dreamer of an essential baseness is commoner than 
the dream that tells in his favor morally. 

I dare say every reader of this paper has had dreams 
so amusing that he has wakened himself from them 
by laughing, and then not found them so very funny, 
or perhaps not been able to recall them at all. I have 
had at least one of this sort, remarkable for other rea- 
sons, which remains perfect in my mind, though it is 
now some ten years old. One of the children had 
been exposed to a very remote chance of scarlet-fever 
at the house of a friend, and had been duly scolded 
for the risk, which was then quite forgotten. I 
dreamed that this friend, however, was giving a ladies' 
lunch, at which I was unaccountably and invisibly 
present, and the talk began to run upon the scarlet- 
fever cases in her family. She said that after the last 
she had fumigated the whole house for seventy-two 
hours (the period seemed very significant and impor- 



I TALK OF DKEAMS. 115 

tant in my dream), and had burned everything she 
could lay her hands on. 

" And what did the nurse burn ? " asked one of the 
other ladies. 

The hostess began to laugh: "The nurse didn't 
burn a thing ! " 

Then all the rest burst out laughing at the joke, and 
the laughter woke me, to see the boy sitting up in his 
bed, and hear him saying, " Oh, I am so sick ! " 

It was the nausea which announces scarlet-fever, 
and for six weeks after that we were in quarantine. 
Very likely the fear of the contagion had been in my 
nether mind all the time, but, so far as consciousness 
could testify of it, I had wholly forgotten it. 

VI. 

One rarely loses one's personality in dreams ; it is 
rather intensified, with all the proper circumstances 
and relations of it, but I have had at least one dream 
in which I seemed to transcend my own circumstance 
and condition with remarkable completeness. Even 
my epoch, my precious present, I left behind (or ahead, 
rather), and in my unity with the persons of my dream 
I became strictly mediaeval. In fact, I have always 
called it my mediaeval dream, to such as I could get 



116 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

to listen to it; and it had for its scene a feudal tower, 
in some waste place ; a tower open at tlie top, and with 
a deep, clear pool of water at the bottom, so that it 
instantly became known to me, as if I had always 
known it, for the Pool Tower. While I stood looking 
into it, in a mediaeval dress and a mediaeval mood, 
there came flying in at the open door of the ruin be- 
side me the duke's hunchback, and after him, furious 
and shrieking maledictions, the swarthy beauty whom 
I was aware the duke was tired of. The keeping was 
now not only ducal, but thoroughly Italian, and it was 
suggested somehow to my own subtle Italian percep- 
tion that the hunchback had been set on to tease the 
girl, and provoke her so that she would turn upon him, 
and try to wreak her fury on him, and chase him into 
the Pool Tower, and up the stone stairs that wound 
round its hollow to the top, where the solemn sky 
showed. The fearful spire of the steps was unguarded, 
and when I had lost the pair from sight, with the 
dwarf's mocking laughter and the girl's angry cries in 
my ears, there came fluttering from the height, like a 
bird wounded and whirling from a lofty tree, the figure 
of the girl, while far aloof the hunchback peered over 
at her fall. Midway in her descent her head struck 
against the edge of the steps, with a kish, such as an 



I TALK OF DREAMS. 117 

egg-shell makes when broken against the edge of a 
platter, and then plunged into the dark pool at my 
feet, where I could presently see her lying in the clear 
depths, and the blood curling upward from the wound 
in her skull, like a dark smoke. I was not sensible of 
any great pity ; I accepted the affair, quite medisevally, 
as something that might very well have happened, giv- 
en the girl, the duke and the dwarf, and the time and 
place. 

I am rather fond of a mediaeval setting for those 
'" Dreams that wave before -the half-shut eye," 
just closing for an afternoon nap. Then I invite to 
my vision a wide landscape, with a cold wintry after- 
noon light upon it, and over this plain I have bands 
and groups of people scurrying, in mediaeval hose of 
divers colors, and mediaeval leathern jerkins, hugging 
themselves against the frost, and very miserable. They 
affect me with a profound compassion ; they represent 
to me, somehow, the vast mass of humanity, the mass 
that does the work, and earns the bread, and goes cold 
and hungry through all the ages. I should be at a 
loss to say why this was the effect, and I am utterly 
unable to say why these fore-dreams, which I partially 
solicit, should have such a tremendous significance as 
they seem to have. They are mostly of the most 



118 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

evanescent and intangible character, but tbey have one 
trait in common. Tbey always involve the attribution 
of ethical motive and quality to material things, and 
in their passage through my brain they promise me a 
solution of the riddle of the painful earth in the very 
instant when they are gone forever. They are of in- 
numerable multitude, chasing each other with the 
swiftness of light, and never staying to be seized by 
the memory, which seems already drugged with sleep 
before their course begins. One of these dreams, in- 
deed, I did capture, and I found it to be the figure 8, 
but lying on its side, and in that posture involving the 
mystery and the revelation of the mystery of the uni- 
verse. I leave the reader to imagine why. 

As we grow older, I think we are less and less able 
to remember our dreams. This is perhaps because 
the experience of youth is less dense, and the empty 
spaces of the young consciousness are more hospitable 
to these airy visitants. A few dreams of my later life 
stand out in strong relief, but for the most part they 
blend in an indistinguishable mass, and pass away 
with the actualities into a common oblivion. I should 
say that they were more frequent with me than they 
used to be ; it seems to me that now I dream whole 
nights through, and much more about the business of 



I TALK OF DREAMS. 119 

my waking life than formerly. As I earn my living 
by weaving a certain sort of dreams into literary form, 
it might be supposed tbat I would sometime dream of 
tbe personages in these dreams, but I cannot remem- 
ber that I have ever done so. The two kinds of 
inventing, the voluntary and the involuntary, seem 
absolutely and finally distinct. 

Of the prophetic dreams which people sometimes 
have I have mentioned the only one of mine which 
had any dramatic interest, but I have verified in my 
own experience the theory of Ribot that approaching 
disease sometimes intimates itself in dreams of the 
disorder impending, before it is otherwise declared in 
the organism. In actual sickness I think that I dream 
rather less than in health. I had a malarial fever when 
I was a boy, and I had a sort of continuous dream in 
it that distressed me greatly. It was of gliding down 
the school-house stairs without touching my feet to 
the steps, and this was indescribably appalling. 

The anguish of mind that one suffers from the im- 
aginary dangers of dreams is probably of the same 
quality as that inspired by real peril in waking. A 
curious proof of this happened within my knowledge 
not many years ago. One of the neighbor's children 
was coasting down a long hill with a railroad at the 



120 niPKESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

foot of it, and as he neared the bottom an express train 
rushed round the curve. The flag-man ran forward 
and shouted to the boy to throw himself ofE his sled, 
but he kept on, and ran into the locomotive, and was 
so hurt that he died. His injuries, however, were to 
the spine, and they were of a kind that rendered him 
insensible to pain while he lived. He talked very 
clearly and calmly of his accident, and when he was 
asked why he did not throw himself off his sled, as 
the flag-man bade him, he said, " / thought it luas a 
dream.'''' The reality had, through the mental stress, 
no doubt transmuted itself to the very substance of 
dreams, and he had felt the same kind and quality of 
suffering as he would have done if he had been dream- 
ing. The Norwegian poet and novelist, Bjornstjerne 
Bjornson, was at my house shortly after this happened, 
and he was greatly struck by the psychological im- 
plications of the incident; it seemed to mean for him 
all sorts of possibilities in the obscure realm where it 
cast a fitful light. 

But such a glimmer soon fades, and the darkness 
thickens round us again. It is not with the blindfold 
sense of sleep that we shall ever find out the secret of 
life, I fancy, either in the dreams which seem personal 
to us each one, or those universal dreams which we 



I TALK OF DREAMS. 121 

apparently share with the whole race. Of the race- 
dream, as I may call it, there is one hardly less com- 
mon than that dream of going about insufficiently 
clad, which I have already mentioned, and that is the 
dream of suddenly falling from some height, and wak- 
ing with a start. The experience before the start is 
extremely dim, and latterly I have condensed this 
dread almost as much as the preliminary passages of 
my burglar-dream. I am aware of nothing but an in- 
stant of danger, and then comes the jar or jolt that 
wakens me. Upon the whole, I find this a great sav- 
ing of emotion, and I do not know but there is a tend- 
ency, as I grow older, to shorten up the detail of 
what may be styled the conventional dream, the dream 
which we have so often that it is like a story read be- 
fore. Indeed, the plots of dreams are not much more 
varied than the plots of romantic novels, which are 
notoriously stale and hackneyed. It would be inter- 
esting, and possibly important, if some observer would 
note the recurrence of this sort of dreams, and classify 
their varieties. I think we should all be astonished 
to find how few and slight the variations were. 



122 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

VII. 

If I come to speak of dreams concerning tlie dead, 

it must be with a tenderness and awe that all who 

have had them will share with me. Nothing is more 

remarkable in them than the fact that the dead, though 

they are dead, yet live, and are, to our commerce with 

them, quite like all other living persons. We may 

recognize, and they may recognize, that they are no 

longer in the body, but they are as verily living as we 

are. This may be merely an effect from the doctrine 

of immortality which we all hold or have held, and 

yet I would fain believe that it may be something like 

proof of it. No one really knows, or can know, but 

one may at least hope, without offending science, 

which indeed no longer frowns so darkly upon faith. 

This persistence of life in those whom we mourn as 

dead, may not it be a witness of the fact that the 

consciousness cannot accept the notion of death at all, 

and, 

"Whatever crazy sorrow saith," 

that we have never truly felt them lost ? Sometimes 
those who have died come back in dreams as parts of 
a common life which seems never to have been broken ; 
the old circle is restored without a flaw ; but whether 
they do this, or whether it is acknowledged between 



I TALK OF DREAMS. 123 

them and us that they have died, and are now disem- 
bodied spirits, the effect of life is the same. Perhaps 
in those dreams they and we are alike disembodied 
spirits, and the soul of the dreamer, which so often 
seems to abandon the body to the animal, is then the 
conscious entity, the thing which the dreamer feels to 
be himself, and is mingling with the souls of the de- 
parted on something like the terms which shall here- 
after be constant. 

I think very few of those who have lost their be- 
loved have failed to receive some sign or message from 
them in dreams, and often it is of deep and abiding 
consolation. It may be that this is our anguish com- 
pelling the echo of love out of the darkness where 
nothing is, but it may be that there is something there, 
which answers to our throe with pity and with longing 
like our own. Again, no one knows, but in a matter 
impossible of definite solution I will not refuse the 
comfort which belief can give. Unbelief can be no 
gain, and belief no loss. But those dreams are so 
dear, so sacred, so interwoven with the finest and ten- 
derest tissues of our being that one cannot speak of 
them freely, or indeed more than most vaguely. It is 
enough to say that one has had them, and to know 
that alm6st every one else has had them too. They 



124 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

seem to be among the universal dreams, and a strange 
quality of them is, that though they deal with a fact 
of universal doubt, they are, to my experience at least, 
not nearly so fantastic or capricious as the dreams that 
deal with the facts of every-day life, and with the af- 
fairs of people still in this world. 

I do not know whether it is common to dream of 
faces or figures strange to our waking knowledge, but 
occasionally I have done this. I suppose it is much 
the same kind of invention that causes the person we 
dream of to say or do a thing unexpected to us. But 
this is rather common, and the creation of a novel as- 
pect, the physiognomy of a stranger, in the person we 
dream of, is rather rare. In all my dreams I can recall 
but one presence of the kind. I have never dreamed 
of any sort of monster foreign to my knowledge, or 
even of any grotesque thing made up of elements 
familiar to it; the grotesqueness has always been in 
the motive or circumstance of the dream. I have very 
seldom dreamed of animals, though once, when I was 
a boy, for a time after I had passed a corn-field where 
there were some bundles of snakes, writhen and knot- 
ted together in the cold of an early spring day, I had 
dreams infested by like images of these loathsome 
reptiles. I suppose that every one has had dreams of 



I TALK OF DREAMS. 125 

finding his way through unnamable filth, and of feed- 
ing upon hideous carnage ; these are clearly the pun- 
ishment of gluttony, and are the fumes of a rebellious 
stomach. 

I have heard people say they have sometimes 
dreamed of a thing, and awakened from their dream, 
and then fallen asleep and dreamed of the same thing; 
but I believe that this is all one continuous dream ; 
that they did not really awaken, but only dreamed that 
they awakened. I have never had any such dream, 
but at one time I had a recurrent dream, which was so 
singular that I thought no one else had ever had a re- 
current dream till I proved that it was rather common 
by starting the inquiry in the Contributors' Club in the 
Atlantic Monthly ^ when I found that great numbers 
of people have recurrent dreams. My own recurrent 
dreams began to come during the first year of my con- 
sulate at Venice, where I had hoped to find the same 
kind of poetic dimness on the phases of American 
life, which I wished to treat in literature, as the dis- 
tance in time would have given. I should not wish 
any such dimness now; but those were my romantic 
days, and I was sorely baffled by its absence. The 
disappointment began to haunt my nights as well as 
my days, and a dream repeated itself from week to 



126 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

week for a matter of eight or ten montlis to one effect. 
I dreamed that I had gone home to America, and that 
people met me and said, "Why, yon have given up 
your place!" and I always answered: "Certainly not; 
I haven't done at all what I mean to do there, yet. I 
am only here on my ten days' leave." I meant the 
ten days which a consul might take each quarter with- 
out applying to the Department of State ; and then I 
would reflect how impossible it was that I should make 
the visit in that time. I saw that I should be found 
out, and dismissed from my oflSce and publicly dis- 
graced. Then, suddenly, I was not consul at Venice, 
and had not been, but consul at Delhi in India ; and 
the distress I felt would all end in a splendid Oriental 
phantasmagory of elephants and native princes, with 
their retinues in procession, which I suppose was 
mostly out of my reading of De Quincey. This dream, 
with no variation that I can recall, persisted till I broke 
it up by saying, in the morning after it had recurred, 
that I had dreamed that dream again ; and so it began 
to fade away, coming less and less frequently, and at 
last ceasing altogether. 

I am rather proud of that dream ; it is really my 
battle-horse among dreams, and I think I will ride 
away on it. 



AN EAST-SIDE RAMBLE, 

The New Yorkers, following the custom of Europe, 
often fence themselves about with a great deal of 
ceremony in social matters, even such small social mat- 
ters as making calls. 

Some ladies have days when they receive calls; oth- 
ers have no specified day, and then you take your 
chance of being turned from the door without seeing 
them, or if you find them, of finding them reluctant 
and preoccupied. A friend of mine says he has often 
felt as if he had been admitted through the error of 
the man or the maid who opened the door to him at 
such houses, and who returned, after carrying up his 
name, to say, with a frightened air, that the lady would 
be down in a moment. 

But when there are days there is never any misgiv- 
ing about letting you in. The door is whisked open 
before you have had time to ring, sometimes by a ser- 
vant who has the effect of not belonging to the house, 



128 IMPKBSSIONS AND EXPBEIENCES. 

but hired for the afternooa. Then you leave your 
card on a platter of some sort in the hall to attest the 
fact of your visit, and at the simpler houses find your 
way into the drawing-room unannounced, though 
the English custom of shouting your name before you 
is very common and is always observed where there is 
any pretense to fashion. Certain ladies receive once 
a week throughout the season ; others receive on some 
day each week of December or January or February, 
as the case may be. When there is this limit to a 
month, the reception insensibly takes on the character 
of an afternoon tea, and, in fact, it varies from that 
only in being a little less crowded. There is tea or 
chocolate or mild punch and a table spread with pas- 
tries and sweets, which hardly any one touches. A 
young lady dedicates herself to the service of each 
urn and offers you the beverage that flows from it. 
There is a great air of gayety, a very excited chatter 
of female voices, a constant flutter of greeting and 
leave-taking and a general sense of amiable emptiness 
and bewildered kindness v,^hen you come away. The 
genius of these little affairs is supposed to be informal- 
ity, but at some houses where you enjoy such informal- 
ities you find two men in livery on the steps outside, a 
third opens the door for you, a fourth takes your hat 



AN EAST-SIDE KAMBLE. 129 

and stick, a fifth receives your overcoat and a sixth 
catches at your name and miscalls it into the drawing 
room. 

I. 

But I must not give too exclusive an impression of 
ceremony in the New-Yorkers. I made some calls 
about Christmas-time last year in a quarter of the 
city where the informalities are real and where the 
hospitalities, such as they were, I thought as sincere 
as in the houses where the informalities are more ap- 
parent. The sort of calls I made were rather fashion- 
able some years ago, but are so no longer. It was a 
fad to make them, and the fad, like all really nice fads, 
came from England, and perhaps it has now died out 
here because it has died out there. At any rate, it 
seems certain that there is now less interest, less curi- 
osity, concerning the home life of the poor than there 
was then among the comfortable people. I do not 
say there is less sympathy — there must be still a good 
deal of sympathy — ^but I should say there was less 
hope with the well-to-do of bettering the condition of 
the ill- to-do ; some philosophers even warn us against 
indulging a feeling of commiseration, lest it should 
encourage the poor to attempt themselves to better 
their condition. 

I 



130 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

Yet there are no signs of rebellion on the part of 
the poor, whom I found as tame and peaceful, appar- 
ently, when I went the rounds of their unceremonious 
at-homes as the most anxious philosopher could desire. 
My calls were by no means of the nature of a perqui- 
sition, but they left very little unknown to me, I fancy, 
of the way the poor live, so frank and simple is their 
life. They included some tenements of the American 
quarter, near the point of the island, on the West Side, 
and a rather greater number on the East Side, in the 
heart of the district abandoned chiefly to the Eussian 
Jews, though there are no doubt other nationalities to 
be found there. It is said to be more densely popu- 
lated than any other area in the world, or at least in 
Christendom, for within a square mile there are more 
than three hundred and fifty thousand men, women 
and children. One can imagine from this fact alone 
how they are housed and what their chances of the 
comforts and decencies of life may be. But I must 
not hurry to the region of these homes before I have 
first tried to show the interiors of that quarter called 
American, where I found the Americans represented, 
as they are so often, by Irish people. The friend who 
went with me on my calls led me across the usual 
surface tracks, under the usual elevated tracks, and 



AN BAST-SIDE RAMBLE. 131 

suddenly dodged before me into an alleyway about 
two feet wide. This crept under bouses fronting on 
the squalid street we had left and gave into a sort of 
court some ten or twelve feet wide by thirty or forty 
feet long. The buildings surrounding it were low and 
very old. One of them was a stable, which contributed 
its stench to the odors that rose from the reeking pave- 
ment and from the closets filling an end of the court, 
with a corner left beside them for the hydrant that 
supplied the water of the whole inclosure. It is from 
this court that the inmates of the tenements have their 
sole chance of sun and air. What the place must be 
in summer I had not the heart to think, and on the 
wintry day of my visit I could not feel the fury of the 
skies which my guide said would have been evident to 
me if I had seen it in August. I could better fancy 
this when I climbed the rickety stairs within one of 
the houses and found myself in a typical New York 
tenement. Then I almost choked at the thought of 
what a hot day, what a hot night, must be in such a 
place, with the two small windows inhaling the putrid 
breath of the court and transmitting it, twice fouled 
by the passage through the living-room, to the black 
hole in the rear, where the whole family lay on the 
heap of rags that passed for a bed. 



132 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPEKIENCES. 

We liad our clioice which door to knock at on the 
narrow landing, a yard wide at most, which opened 
into such tenements to the right and left, as many 
stories up as the stairs mounted. We stood at once 
in the presence of the hostess ; there was no ceremony 
of sending in our cards here, or having our names 
called to her. In one case we found her over the 
washtub, with her three weeks' babe bundled in a chair 
beside it. A table, with a half -eaten loaf, that formed 
her breakfast, on it, helped, with the cooking-stove, 
to crowd the place past any possibility of sitting down, 
if there had been chairs to sit in; so we stood, as 
people do at an afternoon tea. At sight of us the 
woman began to cry and complain that her man had 
been drunk and idle for a month and did nothing for 
her; though in these times he might have been sober 
and idle and done as little. Some good soul was pay- 
ing the rent for her, which was half as great as would 
have hired a decent flat in a good part of the town ; 
but how her food came or the coal for her stove re- 
mained a mystery which we did not try to solve. She 
wiped her tears at the exhibition of a small coin, which 
she had perhaps dimly foreseen through them from 
the moment they began to flow. It was wrong, per- 
haps, to give her money, but it was not very wrong, 



AK EAST-SIDE RAMBLE. 133 

perhaps, for tlie 'money was not very much, and if it 
pauperized her it could not have been said that she 
was wholly unpauperized before she took it. These 
are very difficult cases, but all life is a hopeless tangle, 
and the right is something that does not show itself 
at once, especially in economical affairs. 

In another tenement we found a family as gay and 
hopeful as this was dismal and desperate. An Irish 
lady with a stylish fringe of red hair decorating her 
forehead, welcomed us with excuses for the state of the 
apartment, which in the next breath she proved herself 
very proud of, for she said that if people were not 
comfortable in their houses it was because they were 
slovenly and untidy. I could not see that she was 
neater than her neighbor on the landing below. She 
had a florid taste in pictures, and half a dozen large 
colored prints went far to hide the walls, which, she 
said, the landlord had lately had whitewashed, though 
to eyes less fond than hers they showed a livid blue. 
The whitewashing was the sole repairs which had been 
put upon her tenement since she came into it, but she 
seemed to think it quite enough ; and her man, who 
sat at leisure near the stove, in the three days' beard 
which seems inseparable from idle poverty, was quite 
boastful of its advantages. He said that he had lived 



134: IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

in that court for thirty years and there was no such 
air anywhere else in this world. I could readily be- 
lieve him, being there to smell it and coming away 
with the taste of it in my mouth. Like other necessa- 
ries of life, it must have been rather scanty in that 
happy home, especially at night, when the dark fell 
outside and a double dark thickened in the small bin 
which stood open to our gaze at the end of the room. 
The whitewash seemed not to have penetrated to this 
lair, where a frowzy mattress showed itself on a rick- 
ety bedstead. The beds in these sleeping-holes were 
never made up ; they were rounded into a heap and 
seemed commonly of a coarse brown sacking. They 
had always a horrible fascination for me. I fancied 
them astir with a certain life which, if there had been 
a consensus of it to that effect, might have walked off 
with them. 

All the tenements here were of this size and shape 
— a room with windows opening upon the court and at 
the rear the small black bin or pen for the bed. The 
room was perhaps twelve feet square and the bin was 
six, and for such a dwelling the tenant pays six dollars 
a month. If he fails to pay it he is evicted, and some 
thirty thousand evictions have taken place in the past 
year. But an eviction is by no means the dreadful 



AN EAST-SIDE RAMBLE. 135 

hardship the reader would perhaps imagine it. To be 
sure, it means putting the tenant on the sidewalk with 
his poor household gear in any weather and at any 
hour ; but if it is very cold or very wet weather, the 
evicted family is seldom suffered to pass the night 
there. The wretched neighbors gather about and take 
them in, and their life begins again on the old terms; 
or the charities come to their aid, and they are dis- 
persed into the different refuges until the father or 
mother can find another hole for them to crawl into. 
Still, natural as it all is, I should think it must surprise 
an Irishman, who supposed he had left eviction behind 
him in his native land, to find it so rife in the country 
of his adoption. 

II. 

My friend asked me if I would like to go into any 
other tenements, but I thought that if what I had 
seen was typical, I had seen enough in that quarter. 
The truth is, I had not yet accustomed myself to go- 
ing in upon people in that way, though they seemed 
accustomed to being gone in upon without any cere- 
mony but the robust " Good-morning ! " my companion 
gave them by way of accounting for our presence, and 
I wanted a little interval to prepare myself for further 
forays. The people seemed quite ready to be ques- 



136 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

tioned, and answered us as persons in authority. They 
may liave taken us for detectives, or agents of benev- 
olent societies, or journalists in search of copy. In 
any case, they had nothing to lose and they might 
have something to gain; so they received us kindly 
and made us as much at home among them as they 
knew how. It may have been that in some instances 
they supposed that we were members of the Board of 
Health and were their natural allies against their land- 
lords. 

I had not realized before how much this noble in- 
stitution can befriend the poor, so potently sustained 
as it is in the discharge of its duties by the popular 
sentiment in a land where popular sentiment is so of- 
ten so weak. It has full power, in the public interest, 
to order repairs and betterments necessary for the 
general health in any domicile, rich or poor, in the 
city, and no man's pleasure or profit may hinder it. 
In cases of contagion or infection, it may isolate the 
neighborhood or vacate the premises, or, in certain 
desperate conditions, destroy them. As there are al- 
ways pestilences of some sort preying upon the poor 
(as if their poverty were not enough), my companion 
could point out a typhus quarter, which the Board 
had shut up and which we must not approach. Such 



AN EAST-SIDE JBAMBLE. 137 

minor plagues as smallpox, scarlet-fever, and diphtheria 
are quickly discovered and made known, and the places 
that they have infested are closed till they can be 
thoroughly purified. Any tenant believing his prem- 
ises to be in an unwholesome or dangerous state may 
call in the Board, and from its decision the landlord 
has no appeal. He must make the changes the Board 
ordains, and he must make them at his own cost, 
though no doubt, when the tenant can pay, he con- 
trives somehow to make him pay in the end. The 
landlord, especially if he battens on the poorer sort of 
tenants, is always in fear of the Board, and the tenant 
is in love with it, for he knows that, in a community 
otherwise delivered over to the pursuit of pelf or 
pleasure, it stands his ready friend, whose mandate 
private interest obeys as it obeys no other. It seems 
to have more honor than any other institution among 
us, and, amid the most frightful corruption of every 
kind, to remain incorruptible. Very likely the land- 
lord may sometimes think that it abuses its power, but 
the tenant never thinks so, and the public seems al- 
ways to agree with the tenant. The press, which is 
so keen to scent out paternalism in municipal or na- 
tional affairs, has not yet perceived any odor of it in 
the Board of Health, and stands its constant friend, 



138 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

though it embodies in the most destinctive form the 
principle that, in a civilized community, the collective 
interest is supreme. Even if such an extension of its 
powers were not in the order of evolution, it would not 
be so illogical for the Board of Health to command 
the abatement of poverty when the diseases that flow 
from poverty cannot be otherwise abated. I should 
not like to prophesy that it will ever do so, but 
stranger things have happened through the necessity 
that knows no law, not even the law of demand and 
supply — the demand of Moloch and the supply of 
Misery. 

III. 

I do not know whether the Hebrew quarter, when 
I began to make my calls there, seemed any worse 
than the American quarter or not. But I noticed 
presently a curious subjective effect in myself, which 
I offer for the reader's speculation. 

There is something in a very little experience of 
such places that blunts the perception, so that they do 
not seem so dreadful as they are ; and I should feel as 
if I were exaggerating if I recorded my first impres- 
sion of their loathsomeness. I soon came to look 
upon the conditions as normal, not for me, indeed, or 
for the kind of people I mostly consort with, but for 



AN EAST-SIDE RAMBLE. 139 

the inmates of tlie dens and lairs about me. Perhaps 
this was partly their fault ; they were uncomplaining, 
if not patient, in circumstances where I believe a sin- 
gle week's sojourn, with no more hope of a better lot 
than they could have, would make anarchists of the 
best people in the city. Perhaps the poor people 
themselves are not so thoroughly persuaded that there 
is anything very unjust in their fate, as the compas- 
sionate think. They at least do not know the better 
fortune of others, and they have the habit of passively 
enduring their own. I found them usually cheerful 
in the Hebrew quarter, and they had so much courage 
as enabled them to keep themselves noticeably clean 
in an environment where I am afraid their betters 
would scarcely have had heart to wash their faces and 
'omb their hair. There was even a decent tidiness in 
their dress, which I did not find very ragged, though 
it often seemed unseasonable and insufficient. But 
here again, as in many other phases of life, I was 
struck by men's heroic superiority to their fate, if 
their fate is hard ; and I felt anew that if prosperous 
and comfortable people were as good in proportion to 
their fortune as these people were they would be as 
the angels of light, which, I am afraid they now but 
faintly resemble. 



14:0 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

One of tlie places we visited was a court somewliat 
like that we had already seen in the American quarter, 
but rather smaller and with more the effect of a pit, 
since the walls around it were so much higher. There 
was the same row of closets at one side and the hy- 
drant next them, but here the hydrant was bound up 
in rags to keep it from freezing, apparently, and the 
wretched place was by no means so foul under foot. 
To be sure, there was no stable to contribute its filth, 
but we learned that a suitable stench was not wanting 
from a bakery in one of the basements, which a man 
in good clothes and a large watch-chain told us rose 
from it in suffocating fumes at a certain hour, when 
the baker was doing some unimaginable thing to the 
bread. This man seemed to be the employer of labor 
in one of the rooms above, and he said that when the 
smell began they could hardly breathe. He caught 
promptly at the notion of the Board of Health, and I 
dare say that the baker will be duly abated. None of 
the other people complained, but that was perhaps 
because they had only their Yiddish to complain 
in, and knew that it would be wasted on us. They 
seemed neither curious nor suspicious concerning us ; 
they let us go everywhere, as if they had no thought 
of hindering us. One of the tenements we entered 



AN EAST-SIDE RAMBLE. 141 

had just been vacated ; but there was a little girl of 
ten there, with some much smaller children, amusing 
them in the empty space. Through a public-spirited 
boy, who had taken charge of us from the beginning 
and had a justly humorous sense of the situation, we 
learned that this little maid was not the sister but the 
servant of the others, for even in these low levels so- 
ciety makes its distinctions. I dare say that the ser- 
vant was not suffered to eat with the others when they 
had anything to eat, and that when they had nothing 
her inferiority was somehow brought home to her. 
She may have been made to wait and famish after the 
others had hungered some time. She was a cheerful 
and friendly creature and her small brood were kept 
tidy like herself. 

The basement under this vacant tenement we found 
inhabited, and though it was a most preposterous place 
for people to live, it was not as dirty as one would 
think. To be sure, it was not very light and all the 
dirt may not have been visible. One of the smiling 
women who were there made their excuses, " Poor 
people ; cannot keep very nice," and laughed as if she 
had said a good thing. There was nothing in the 
room but a table and a few chairs and a stove, with- 
out fire, but they were all contentedly there together 



142 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

in the dark, wMch hardly let tliem see one another's 
faces. My companion struck a match and held it to 
the cavernous mouth of an inner cellar half as large 
as the room we were in, where it winked and paled so 
soon that I had only a glimpse of the bed, with the 
rounded heap of bedding on it ; but out of this hole, 
as if she had been a rat, scared from it by the light, 
a young girl came, rubbing her eyes and vaguely smil- 
ing, and vanished up-stairs somewhere. 

IV. 

I found no shape or size of tenement but this. 
There was always the one room, where the inmates 
lived by day, and the one den, where they slept by 
night, apparently all in the same bed, though probably 
the children were strewn about the floor. If the ten- 
ement were high up the living-room had more light 
and air than if it were low down; but the sleeping- 
hole never had any light or air of its own. My calls 
were made on one of the mild days which fell before 
last Christmas, and so I suppose I saw these places at 
their best ; but what they must be when the summer 
is seven times heated without, as it often is in New 
York, or when the arctic cold has pierced these hap- 
less abodes and the inmates huddle together for their 



AN EAST-SIDE KAMBLB. 143 

animal heat, the reader must imagine for himself. 
The Irish-Americans had flaming stoves, even on that 
soft day, but in the Hebrew tenements I found no 
fire. They were doubtless the better for this, and it 
is one of the comical anomalies of the whole afEair that 
they are singularly healthy. The death rate among 
them is one of the lowest in the city, though whether 
for their final advantage it might not better be the 
highest, is one of the things one must not ask one's 
self. In their presence I should not dare to ask it, 
even in my deepest thought. They are then so like 
other human beings and really so little different from 
the best, except in their environment, that I had to 
get away from this before I could regard them as wild 
beasts. 

I suppose there are and have been worse conditions 
of life, but if I stopped short of savage life I found 
it hard to imagine them. I did not exaggerate to my- 
self the squalor that I saw, and I do not exaggerate it 
to the reader. As I have said, I was so far from sen- 
timentalizing it that I almost immediately reconciled 
myself to it, as far as its victims were concerned. Still, 
it was squalor of a kind which, it seemed to me, it 
could not be possible to outrival anywhere in the life 
one commonly calls civilized. It is true that the Ind- 



14A: IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

ians who formerly inhabited this island were no more 
comfortably lodged in their wigwams of bark and 
skins than these poor New-Yorkers in their tenements. 
But the wild men pay no rent, and if they are crowded 
together upon terms that equally forbid decency and 
comfort in their shelter, they have the freedom of the 
forest and the prairie about them ; they have the illim- 
itable sky and the whole light of day and the four 
winds to breathe when they issue into the open air. 
The New York tenement dwellers, even when they 
leave their lairs, are still pent in their high-walled 
streets, and inhale a thousand stenches of their own 
and others' making. The street, except in snow and 
rain, is always better than their horrible houses, and 
it is doubtless because they pass so much of their time 
in the street that the death rate is so low among them. 
Perhaps their domiciles can be best likened for dark- 
ness and discomfort to the dugouts or sod huts of the 
settlers on the great plains. But these are only tem- 
porary shelters, while the tenement dwellers have no 
hope of better housing ; they have neither the prospect 
of a happier fortune through their own energy as the 
settlers have, nor any chance from the humane efforts 
and teachings of missionaries, like the savages. With 
the tenement dwellers it is from generation to genera- 



AN EAST-SIDE RAMBLE. 145 

tion, if not for the mdividual, then for the class, since 
no one expects that there will not always be tenement 
dwellers in New York as long as our present econom- 
ical conditions endure. 

V. 

"When I first set out on my calls I provided myself 
with some small silver, which I thought I might fitly 
give, at least to the children, and in some of the first 
places I did this. But presently I began to fancy an 
unseemliness in it, as if it were an indignity added to 
the hardship of their lot, and to feel that unless I gave 
all my worldly wealth to them I was in a manner 
mocking their misery. I could not give everything, 
for then I should have had to come upon charity my- 
self, and so I mostly kept my little coins in my pocket ; 
but when we mounted into the court again from that 
cellar apartment and found an old, old woman there, 
wrinkled and yellow, with twinkling eyes and a tooth- 
less smile, waiting to see us, as if she were as curious 
in her way as we were in ours, I was tempted. She 
said in her Yiddish, which the humorous boy inter- 
preted, that she was eighty years old, and she looked 
a hundred, while she babbled unintelligibly but very 
cheerfully on. I gave her a piece of twenty-five cents 
J 



146 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

and she burst into a blessing, tbat I should not have 
thought could be bought for money. "We did not stay 
to hear it out, but the boy did, and he followed to re- 
port it to me, with a gleeful interest in its beneficent 
exaggerations. If it is fulfilled I shall live to be a 
man of many and prosperous years, and I shall die 
possessed of wealth that will endow a great many col- 
leges and found a score of libraries. I do not know 
whether the boy envied me or not, but I wish I could 
have left that benediction to him, for I took a great 
liking to him, his shrewd smile, his gay eyes, his prom- 
ise of a Hebrew nose, and his whole wise little visage. 
He said that he went to school and studied reading, 
writing, geography and everything. All the children 
we spoke to said that they went to school, and they 
were quick and intelligent. They could mostly speak 
English, while most of their elders knew only Yiddish. 
The sound of this was around us on the street we 
issued into, and which seemed from end to end a vast 
bazaar, where there was a great deal of selling, whether 
there was much buying or not. The place is humor- 
ously called the pig-market by the Christians, because 
everything in the world but pork is to be found there. 
To me its activity was a sorrowfully amusing satire 
upon the business ideal of our plutocratic civilization. 



AN EAST-SIDE KAMBLB. 14:7 

These people were desperately poor, yet they preyed 
upon one another in their commerce, as if they could 
be enriched by selling dear or buying cheap. So far 
as I could see they would only impoverish each other 
more and more, but they traflBcked as eagerly as if 
there were wealth in every bargain. The sidewalks 
and the roadways were thronged with peddlers and 
purchasers, and everywhere I saw splendid types of 
that old Hebrew world which had the sense if not the 
knowledge of God when all the rest of us lay sunk in 
heathen darkness. There were women with oval faces 
and olive tints, and clear, dark eyes, relucent as even- 
ing pools, and men with long beards of jetty black or 
silvery white, and the noble profiles of their race. I 
said to myself that it was among such throngs that 
Christ walked, it was from such people that he chose 
his Disciples and his friends ; but I looked in vain for 
him in Hester street. Probably he was at that mo- 
ment in Fifth Avenue. 

VI. 

After all, I was loath to come away. I should have 
liked to stay and live awhile with such as they, if the 
terms of their life had been possible, for there were 
phases of it that were very attractive. That constant 



148 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

meeting and that neigliborly intimacy were superfi- 
cially at least of a very pleasant effect, and though the 
whole place seemed abandoned to mere trade, it may 
have been a necessity of the case, for I am told that 
many of these Hebrews have another ideal, and think 
and vote in the hope that the land of their refuge shall 
yet some day keep its word to the world, so that men 
shall be equally free in it to the pursuit of happiness. 
I suppose they are mostly fugitives from the Russian 
persecution, and that from the cradle their days must 
have been full of fear and care, and from the time 
they could toil that they must have toiled at whatever 
their hands found to do. Yet they had not the look 
of a degraded people ; they were quiet and orderly, 
and I saw none of the drunkenness or the truculence 
of an Irish or low American neighborhood among them. 
There were no policemen in sight, and the quiet beha- 
vior that struck me so much seemed not to have been 
enforced. Very likely they may have moods different 
from that 1 saw, but I only tell of what I saw, and I 
am by no means ready yet to preach poverty as a sav- 
ing grace. Though they seemed so patient and even 
cheerful in some cases, I do not think it is well for 
human beings to live whole families together in one 
room with a kennel out of it, where modesty may sur- 



AN BAST-SIDE KAMBLE. 149 

vive, but decency is impossible. Neither do I think 
they can be the better men and women for being in- 
sufficiently clothed and fed, though so many of us 
appear none the better for being housed in palaces and 
clad in purple and fine linen and faring sumptuously 
every day. 

I have tried to report simply and honestly what I 
saw of the life of our poorest people that day. One 
might say it was not so bad as it is painted, but I 
think it is quite as bad as it appeared ; and I could not 
see that in itself or in its conditions it held the prom- 
ise or the hope of anything better. If it is tolerable, 
it must endure ; if it is intolerable, still it must endure. 
Here and there one will release himself from it, and 
doubtless numbers are alway doing this, as in the days 
of slavery there were always fugitives; but for the 
great mass the captivity remains. Upon the present 
terms of leaving the poor to be housed by private 
landlords, whose interest it is to get the greatest return 
of money for the money invested, the very poorest 
must always be housed as they are now. Nothing but 
public control in some form or other can secure them 
a shelter fit for human beings. 



TRIBULATIONS OF A CHEERFUL GIVER. , 

Some montlis ago, as I was passing tlirougli a down- 
town street on my way to the elevated station, I saw 
a man sitting on the steps of a house. He seemed to 
be resting his elbows on his knees, and holding out 
both his hands. As I came nearer I perceived that he 
had no hands, but only stumps, where the fingers had 
been cut off close to the palms, and that it was these 
stumps he was holding out in the mute appeal which 
was his form of begging. Otherwise he did not ask 
charity. When I approached him he did not look up, 
and when I stopped in front of him he did not speak. 
I thought this rather fine, in its way ; except for his 
mutilation, which the man really could not help, there 
was nothing to offend the taste; and his immobile 
silence was certainly impressive. 

I decided at once to give him something; for when 
I am in the presence of want, or even the appearance 
of want, there is something that says to me, *' Give to 



TRIBULATIONS OF A CHEERFUL GIVER. 151 

him that asketh," and I have to give, or else go away 
with a bad conscience — a thing I hate. Of course I 
do not give much, for I wish to be a good citizen as 
well as a good Christian ; and as soon as I obey that 
voice which I cannot disobey, I hear another voice re- 
proaching me for encouraging street beggary. I have 
been taught that street beggary is wvoug, and when I 
have to unbutton two coats and go through three or 
four pockets before I can reach the small coin I mean 
to give in compliance with that imperative voice, I 
certainly feel it to be wrong. So I compromise, and 
I am never able to make sure that either of those 
voices is satisfied with me. T am not even satisfied 
with myself ; but I am better satisfied than if I gave 
nothing. That was the selfish reason I now had for 
deciding to yield to my better nature, and to obey the 
voice which bade me " Give to him that asketh " ; for, 
as I said, I hate a bad conscience, and of two bad con- 
sciences I always choose the least, which in a case like 
this, is the one that incensed political economy gives 
me. 

I. 

I put my hand into my hip-pocket, where I keep 
my silver, and found nothing there but half a dollar. 
This at once changed the whole current of my feel- 



152 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

ing'S ; and it was not chill penury that repressed my 
noble rage, but chill affluence. It was manifestly wrong 
to give half a dollar to a man who had no hands, or to 
any sort of beggar. I was willing to commit a small 
act of incivism, but I had not the courage to flout po- 
litical economy to the extent of fifty cents ; and I felt 
that when I was bidden " Give to him that asketh," I 
was never meant to give so much as a half-dollar, but 
a cent, or a half-dime, or at the most a quarter. I 
wished I had a quarter. I would gladly have given a 
quarter, but there was nothing in my pocket but that 
fatal, that inexorably indivisible half-dollar, the conti- 
nent of two quarters, but not practically a quarter. I 
would have asked anybody in sight to change it for 
me, but there was no one passing ; it was a quiet street 
of brown-stone dwellings, and not a thronged thorough- 
fare at any time. At that hour of the late afternoon 
it was deserted, except for the beggar and myself ; and 
I am not sure that he had any business to be sitting 
there, on the steps of another man's house, or that I 
had the right to encourage his invasion by giving him 
anything. For a moment I did not know quite what 
to do. To be sure, I was not bound to the man in any 
way. He had not asked me for charity, and I had 
barely paused before him ; I could go on and ignore 



TKIBTJLATIONS OF A CHEERFUL GIVER. 153 

the incident. I-thouglit of doing this, but then I 
thought of the bad conscience I should be certain to 
have, and I could not go on. I glanced across the 
street, and near the corner I saw a decent-looking res- 
taurant ; and " Wait a minute," I said to the man, as 
if he were likely to go away, and I ran across to get 
my half-dollar changed at the restaurant. 

I was now quite resolved to give him a quarter, and 
be done with it ; the thing was getting to be a bore. 
But when I entered the restaurant I saw no one there 
but a young man quite at the end of a long room ; and 
when he had come all the way forward to find what I 
wanted, I was ashamed to ask him to change my half- 
dollar, and I pretended that I wanted a package of 
Sweet Caporal cigarettes, which I did not want, and 
which it was a pure waste for me to buy, since I do 
not smoke, though doubtless it was better to buy them 
and encourage commerce than to give the half-dollar 
and encourage beggary. At any rate, I instinctively 
felt that I had political economy on my side in the 
transaction, and I made haste to go back to the man 
on the steps, and secure myself with Christian charity 
too. On the way over to him, however, I decided that 
I would not give him a quarter, and I ended by pois- 
ing fifteen cents on one of his outstretched stumps. 



154: IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

He seemed very grateful, and thanked me earnestly, 
witli a little note of surprise in his voice, as if he Avere 
not used to such splendid charity as that ; and in fact, 
I suppose very few people gave so handsomely to him. 
He spoke with a German accent ; and when I asked 
him how he had lost his hands, he answered, " Frost. 
Frozen off, here in the city." I could not go on and 
ask him for further particulars, for I thought it but 
too likely that he had been drunk when exposed to 
weather that would freeze one's hands off, and that he 
was now paying the penalty of his debauchery. I was 
in no wise so much at peace with myself as I had ex- 
pected to be ; and I was still less so when a young girl 
halted as she came by, and, seeing what I had done, 
and hearing what the man said, put a dime on the 
other stump. She looked poor herself ; her sack was 
quite shabby about the seams. I did not think she 
could afford to give so much to a single beggar, and I 
was aware of having tempted her to the excess by my 
own profusion. If she liad seen me giving the man 
only a nickel, she would perhaps have given him a 
cent, which was probably all she could afford. 



TRIBULATIONS OF A CHEERFUL GIVER. 155 
II. 

I came away feeling indescribably squalid. I per- 
ceived now that I could have taken my stand upon the 
high ground of discouraging street beggary, and given 
nothing; but having once lowered myself to the level 
of the early Christians, I ought to have given the half- 
dollar. It did not console me to remember the sur- 
prise in the man's gratitude, and to reflect that I had 
probably given him at least three times as much as he 
usually got from the tenderest-hearted people. I per- 
ceived that I had been the divinely appointed bearer 
of half a dollar to his mutilation and his misery, and I 
had given him fifteen cents out of it, and wasted ten, 
and kept the other twenty -five ; in other words, I had 
embezzled the greater part of the money intrusted to 
me for him. 

"When I got home and told them at dinner just what 
I had done, they all agreed that I had done a mighty 
shabby thing. I do not know whether the reader will 
agree with them or not — perhaps I would rather not 
know ; and on the other hand, I shall not ask him what 
he would have done in the like case. Now that it is 
laid before him in all its shameless nakedness, I dare 
say he will pretend that he would have given the half- 
dollar. But I doubt if he would ; and there is a curi- 



156 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

ous principle governing this whole matter of giving, 
which I would like him to consider with me. Charity 
is a very simple thing when you look at it from the 
standpoint of the good Christian, but it is very com- 
plex when you look at it from the standpoint of the 
good citizen; and there seems to be an instinctive 
effort on our part to reconcile two duties by a certain 
proportion which we observe in giving. Whether we 
say so to ourselves or not, we behave as if it would be 
the wildest folly to give at all in the measure Christ 
bade; and by an apt psychological juggle we adjust 
our succor to the various degrees of need that present 
themselves. To the absolutely destitute it is plain that 
anything will be better than nothing, and so we give 
the smallest charity to those who need charity most. 
I dare say people will deny this, but it is true, all the 
same, as the reader will allow when he thinks about it. 
We act upon a kind of logic in the matter, though I 
do not suppose many act consciously upon it. Here 
is a man whispering to you in the dark that he has 
not had anything to eat all day, and does not know 
where to sleep. Shall you give him a dollar to get a 
good supper and a decent lodging? Certainly not: 
you shall give him a dime, and trust that some one 
else will give him another ; or if you have some charity 



TRIBULATIONS OF A CHEEEFUL GIVER. 157 

tickets about you, then you give him one of them, and 
go away feeling that you have at once befriended and 
outwitted him ; for the supposition is that he is a 
fraud, and has been trying to work you. 

This is not a question which affects the excellence 
of the charities system. I know how good and kind 
and just that is ; but it is a question that affects the 
whole Christian philosophy of giving. A friend, 
whom I was talking the matter over with, was inclined 
to doubt whether Christ's doctrine was applicable, in 
its sweeping simplicity, to our complex modern condi- 
tions ; whether it was final, whether it was the last 
word, as we say. Of course it does seem a little ab- 
surd to give to him that asketh, when you do not know 
what he is going to do with the money, and when you 
do not know whether he has not come to want by his 
own fault, or whether he is really in want. 

III. 

I must say that his statement of his own case is 
usually incoherent. The poor fellows have very little 
imagination or invention ; they might almost as well 
be realistic novelists. I find that those who strike me 
for a night's lodging, when they stop me in the street 
at night, come as a rule from Pittsburg, and are iron- 



158 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

workers of some sort; the last one said he was a pud- 
dler, " A skilled mechanic," he explained — "what is 
called a skilled mechanic " ; and of course he was only- 
watching for some chance to get back to Pittsburg, 
though there was no chance of work, from what he 
told me, after he got there. On the other hand, I find 
that most of those who ask by day for money to get a 
dinner are from Philadelphia, or the rural parts of 
eastern Pennsylvania, though Avithin six months I have 
extended hospitality (I think that is the right phrase) 
to two architectural draftsmen from Boston. They 
were both entirely decent-looking, sober-looking young 
men, who spoke like men of education, and they each 
gratefully accepted a quarter from me. I do not at- 
tempt to account for them, for they made no attempt 
to account for themselves ; and I think the effect was 
more artistic so. 

I am rarely approached by any professed New-York- 
er, which is perhaps a proof of the superior industry 
or prosperity of our city ; but now and then a fellow- 
citizen who has fallen out asks me for money in the 
street, and perhaps goes straight and spends it for 
drink. Drink, however, is as necessary in some forms 
as food itself, and a rich, generous port wine is often 
prescribed for invalids. These men, without exception, 



TRIBULATIONS OF A CHEERFUL GIA^ER. 159 

look like invalids, and I dare say that tliey would 
prefer to buy a rich, generous port wine if I gave 
thera money enough. I never do that, though I have 
a means of making my alms seem greater, to myself 
at least, by practising a little cordiality with the poor 
fellows. I do not give grudgingly or silently, but I 
say, if I give at all, when they ask me, " Why, of 
course ! " or " Yes, certainly " ; and sometimes I invite 
them to use their feeble pov/ers of invention in my 
behalf, and tell how they wish me to think they have 
come to the sad pass of beggary. This seems to flatter 
them, and it makes me feel much better, which is 
really my motive for doing it. 

Now and then they will ofEer me some apology for 
begging, in a tone that says, " I know how it is my- 
self " ; and once there was one who began by saying, 
" I know it's a shame for a strong man like me to be 
begging, but — " They seldom have any devices for 
working me, beyond the simple statement of their des- 
titution ; though there was a case in which I helped a 
poor fellow raise a quarter upon a postal order, which 
he then kept as a pledge of my good faith. Their 
main reliance seems to be lead-pencils, which they 
have in all inferior variety. I find that they will take 
it kindly if you do not want any change back when 



160 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

you have given them a coin worth more than they asked 
for the pencil, and that they will even let you off with- 
out taking the pencil after you have bought it. In the 
end you have to use some means to save yourself from 
the accumulation of pencils, unless you are willing to 
burn them for kindling-wood ; and I find the simplest 
way is not to take them after you have paid for them. 
It is amusing how quickly you can establish a comity 
with these pencil people ; they will not only let you 
leave your pencils with them, but they will sometimes 
excuse you from buying if you remind them that you 
have bought of them lately. Then, if they do not re- 
member you, they at least smile politely and pretend 

to do so. 

IV. 

Ought one to give money to a hand-organist, who 
is manifestly making himself a nuisance before the 
door of some one else? I have asked myself this 
when I have been tempted, and I am not yet quite 
clear about it. At present, therefore, I give only to 
the inaudible street minstrels, who earn an honest liv- 
ing, and make no noise about it. I cannot think that 
a ballad-singer on Sixth Avenue, who pours forth his 
artless lay amid the roar and rattle of the elevated 
trains, the jangle and clatter of the horse-cars, the 



TRIBULATIONS OF A CHEERFUL GIVER. 161 

bang of the grocers* carts, and tlie thunder of the ex- 
press-wagons, is practically molesting anybody ; and I 
believe that one can reward his innocent efforts with- 
out wronging his neighbors. It is always amusing to 
have him stop in his most effective phrase to say, 
" Thank you, thank you, sir," and then go on again. 
The other day, as I dropped my contribution into the 
extended hat, I asked, " How is business ? " and the 
singer interrupted himself to answer, " Nothing-to- 
brag-of-sir-thank-you," and resumed with continuous 
tenderness the " ditty of no tone " that he~ was piping 
to the inattentive uproar of the street. 

It may be doubted whether a balladist who is not 
making himself heard is earning his money ; but, on 
the other hand, it may be asked if he is not less regret- 
table for that reason. A great many good people do 
not earn their money, and yet by universal consent 
they seem to have a right to it. "We cannot oblige 
the poor to earn their money, any more than the rich, 
without attacking the principle on which society is 
based, and classing ourselves with its enemies. If 
people get money out of other people, we ought not 
to ask how they get it, whether it is much or little ; 
and I, at any rate, will not scan too closely the honesty 
of the inaudible balladist of the avenue. Neither will 
K 



162 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

I question the gains of those silentious minstrels who 
grind small, mute organs at the corners of the pave- 
ment, with a little tin cup beside them to receive trib- 
ute. They are usually old, old women, and I suppose 
Italians; but they seem not to be very distinctively 
anything. How they can sit upon the cold stone all 
day long without taking their deaths, passes me to say ; 
and I am inclined to think that they do really earn 
their money, if not as minstrels, then as monuments 
of human endurance. The average American grand- 
mother would sneeze in five seconds, under the same 
conditions, and be laid up for the rest of the winter. 
But these hardy aliens remain unaffected by cold or 
wet, light or dark. One night I came upon one sleep- 
ing on her curbstone, — such a small, dull wad of out- 
worn womanhood ! — her gray old head bent upon her 
knees, and her withered arms wound in her thin shawl. 
It was very chill that night, with a sharp wind sweep- 
ing the street that the Street Department had neg- 
lected ; but this poor old thing slept on, while I stood 
by her trying to imagine her short and simple annals ; 
a dim, far-off childhood in some peasant hut, a girlhood 
with its tender dreams, a motherhood with its cares, a 
grandmotherhood with its pains — the whole round of 
woman's life, with want through all, wound into this 



TRIBULATIONS OF A CHEERFUL GIVER. 163 

last result of houseless age at my feet. How mucli of 
human life comes to no more — if, indeed, one ought 
not to say how little comes to so much ! I sighed, as 
people of feeling used to do in the eighteenth century, 
and dropped a dime into the tin cup. The sound 
startled the beldame, and I hope that before she woke 
and looked up at me she had time to dream riches and 
luxury for the rest of her life. " Bella musica f " I 
said, with a fine irony, and she smiled and shrugged, 
and began to feel for the handle of her organ, as if 
she were willing to begin giving me my money's worth 
on the spot. If we did not see such sights every day 
how impossible they would seem I 

V. 

The whole spectacle of poverty, indeed, is incredi- 
ble. As soon as you cease to have it before your 
eyes, — even when you have it before your eyes, — you 
can hardly believe it, and that is perhaps why so many 
people deny that it exists, or is much more than a 
superstition of the sentimentalist. When I get back 
into my own comfortable room, among my papers and 
books, I remember it as I remember something at the 
theatre. It seems to be turned off, as Niagara does, 
when you come away. The diflSculty here in New 



164 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

York is that the moment you go out again, you find 
it turned on, full tide. I used to live in a country 
supposed to be peculiarly infested by beggars; but I 
believe I was not so much asked for charity in Venice 
as I am in New York. There are as many beggars on 
our streets as in Venice, and as for the organized ef- 
forts to get at one's compassion, there is no parallel for 
New York anywhere. The letters asking aid for air 
funds, salt and fresh, for homes and shelters, for read- 
ing-rooms and eating-rooms, for hospitals and refuges, 
for the lame, halt, and blind, for the old, for the young, 
for the anhungered and ashamed, of all imaginable de- 
scriptions, storm in with every mail, so that one hates 
to open one's letters nowadays ; for instead of finding 
a pleasant line from a friend, one finds an appeal, in 
print imitating typewriting, from several of the mil- 
lionaires in the city for aid of some good object to 
which they have lent the influence of their signatures, 
and inclosing an envelope, directed but not stamped, 
for your subscription. You do not escape from the 
proof of poverty even by keeping indoors amidst your 
own luxurious environment; besides, your digestion 
becomes impaired, and you have to go out, if you are 
to have any appetite for your dinner ; and then the 
trouble begins on other terms. 



TEIBULATIONS OF A CHEEKFUL GIVER. 165 

One of my minor difficulties, if I may keep on con- 
fessing myself to the reader, is a very small pattern of 
newsboys, wliom I am tempted to make keep the 
change when I get a one-cent paper of them and give 
them a five-cent piece. I see men, well dressed, well 
brushed, with the air of being exemplary citizens, 
fathers of families, and pillars of churches, wait pa- 
tiently or impatiently, while these little fellows search 
one pocket and another for the pennies due, or run to 
some comrade Chonnie or Chimmie for them; and I 
cannot help feeling that I may be doing something 
very disorganizing or demoralizing in failing to de- 
mand my change. At first I used to pass on without 
apparently noticing that I had given too much, but I 
perceived that then these small wretches sometimes 
winked to their friends, in the belief that they had 
cheated me ; and now I let them offer to get the change 
before I let them keep it. I may be undermining so- 
ciety, and teaching them to trust in a fickle fortune 
rather than their own enterprise, by overpaying them ; 
but at least I will not corrupt them by letting them 
think they have taken advantage of my ignorance. If 
the reader will not whisper it again, I will own that I 
have sometimes paid as high as ten cents for a one- 
cent paper, which I did not want, when it has been 



166 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

offered me by a very minute newsboy near midnight ; 
and I have done this in conscious defiance of the well- 
known fact that it is a ruse of very minute newsboys 
to be out late when they ought to be in bed at home, 
or at the Home (which seems different), in order to 
work the sympathies of unwary philanthropists. The 
statistics in regard to these miscreants are as unques- 
tionable as those relating to street beggars who have 
amassed fortunes and died amidst rags and riches of 
dramatic character. I am sorry that I cannot say 
where the statistics are to be found. 

VI. 

The actual practice of fraud, even when you dis- 
cover it, must give you interesting question, unless you 
are cock-sure of your sociology. I was once met by 
a little girl on a cross-street in a respectable quarter 
of the town, who burst into tears at sight of me, and 
asked for money to buy her sick mother bread. The 
very next day I was passing through the same street, 
and I saw the same little girl burst into tears at the 
sight of a benevolent-looking lady, whom undoubtedly 
she asked for money for the same good object. The 
benevolent-looking lady gave her nothing, and she tried 
her woes upon several other people, none of whom 



TRIBULATIONS OF A CHEERFUL GIVER. 167 

gave her anything.' I was forced to doubt whetlier, 
upon the whole, her game was worth the candle, or 
whether she was really making a provision for her de- 
clining years by this means. To be sure, her time 
was not worth much, and she could hardly have got 
any other work, she was so young; but it seemed 
hardly a paying industry. By any careful calculation, 
I do not believe she would have been found to have 
amassed more than ten or fifteen cents a day ; and 
perhaps she really had a sick mother at home. Many 
persons are obliged to force their emotions for money, 
whom we should not account wholly undeserving; yet 
I suppose a really good citizen who found this little 
girl trying to cultivate the sympathies of charitable 
people by that system of irrigation would have had 
her suppressed as an impostor. 

In a way she was an impostor, though her sick moth- 
er may have been starving, as she said. It is a nice 
question. Shall we always give to him that asketh ? 
Or shall we give to him that asketh only when we 
know that he has come by his destitution honestly ? 
In other words, what is a deserving case of charity — 
or, rather, what is not ? Is a starving or freezing per- 
son to be denied because he or she is drunken or 
vicious ? What is desert in the poor ? What is de- 



168 IMPRESSIONS AND JEXPEEIENCES. 

sert in the rich, I suppose the reader would answer. 
If this is so, and if we ought not to succor an unde- 
serving poor person, then we ought not to succor an 
undeserving rich person. It will be said that a rich 
person, however undeserving will never be in need of 
our succor, but this is not so clear. If we saw a rich 
person fall in a fit before the horses of a Fifth Avenue 
omnibus, ought not we to run and lift him up, although 
we knew him to be a man whose life was stained by 
every vice and excess, and cruel, wanton, idle, luxuri- 
ous ? I know that I am imagining a quite impossible 
rich person ; but once imagined, ought not we to save 
him all the same as if he were deserving ? I do not 
believe the most virtuous person will say we ought not ; 
and ought not we, then, to rescue the most worthless 
tramp fallen under the wheels of the Juggernaut of 
want ? Is charity the reward of merit? 

VII. 

My friend who was not sure that Christ's doctrine 
was the last word in regard to charity, was quite sure 
that you ought to have a conscience against dead-beats, 
whom I suggested for his consideration, especially the 
dead-beats who come to your house and try to work 
you upon one pretext or another. He said he never 



i 



TRIBULATIONS OF A CHEERFUL GIVER. 169 

gave to them, and 'I asked wliat lie answered them 
when they professed themselves in instant want ; and 
whether he plumply denied them; and it appeared 
that he told them he had other use for his money. I 
suspect this was a proper answer to make. It had 
never occurred to me, hut I think I will try it with 
the next one who comes, and see what effect it has 
upon him. Hitherto I have had no better way than to 
offer them a compromise : if they ask twenty, to pro- 
pose ten ; and if they ask ten, to propose five ; and so 
on down. The first time I did this (it Was with an 
actor, who gave me his I U — the first and only 
I U that I ever got : I suppose he was used to giving 
it on the stage) it seemed to me that I had made 
ten dollars, and since then it has seemed to me that I 
made five dollars on several occasions ; but I now think 
this was an illusion, and that I only saved the money : 
I did not actually add to my store. 

It is usually indigent literature which presents itself 
with these imaginative demands, and I think usually 
fictionists of the romantic school. I do not know but 
it would be well for me as a man of principle to con- 
fine my benefactions to destitute realists : I am sure it 
would be cheaper. Last winter there came to me a 
gentleman thrown out of employment by the comple- 



170 IMPRESSIONS AND ESPERIENBES. 

tion of an encyclopedia lie had been at work on, and 
lie said that he was in absolute want of food for his 
family, who had that morning been set out with all 
his household stuff on the sidewalk for default of 
rent. I relieved his immediate necessity, and sug- 
gested to him that if he would write a simple, unrhetor- 
ical account of his eviction I could probably sell it for 
him ; that this sort of thing mostly happened to the 
inarticulate classes ; and that he had the chance of do- 
ing a perfectly fresh thing in literature. He caught at 
the notion, and said he would begin at once, and I 
said the sooner the better. He asked if it would not be 
well to get the narrative type-written, and I begged 
him not to wait for that ; but he said that he knew a 
person who would typewrite it for him without charge. 
I could only urge haste, and he went away in a glow 
of enterprise. He left with me the address of a twen- 
ty^five cent lodging-house in the Bowery ; for he ex- 
plained that he had got money enough, by selling his 
furniture on the sidewalk to send his family into the 
country, and he was living alone and as cheaply as he 
could. While at work on his narrative he came for 
more relief, and tlaen he vanished out of my knowl- 
edge altogether. I had a leisure afternoon, and went 
down into the Bowery to his lodging-house, and found 



TKIBTJLATIONS OF A CHBERFUIi GIVER. 171 

that he really lodged there, but he was then out ; and 
so far as I am concerned he is out still. I am out 
myself, in the amount I advanced him, and which he 
was to repay me from the money for his eviction art- 
icle. He never wrote it, apparently ; and perhaps his 
experience of eviction lacked the vital element of real- 
ity. I am quite sure he was at heart a romanticist, for 
he was an Englishman, and the Englishmen are all 
romanticists. 

VIII. 

I was at one time worked for a period of years by 
a German-born veteran of our war, whom I was called 
out to see one night from dinner, when I was full of 
good cheer, and, of course, quite helpless against a 
case of want like his. He represented that he was the 
victim of an infirmity brought on by falling from a 
burning bridge under the rebel fire, and was liable to be 
overtaken by it at any moment ; and he showed me all 
sorts of surgeons' certificates in proof of the fact, as 
well as kindly notes from college professors and 
clergymen. I had, therefore, a double motive for be- 
friending him. I had as little wish that he should be 
overtaken by his infirmity in my reception-room as 
that he should go on sleeping in unfinished houses 
and basement areas ; and so I gave him some naoney 



172 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

at once. He was to have his pension money at the 
end of the month, and till then he said he could live 
on what I gave him. I hurried him out of the house 
as fast as I could, for I did not feel safe from his in- 
firmity while he was there. But he kept coming back, 
and always, in view of his threatening infirmity, got 
money from me ; I am not sure that I always pitied 
him so much. At last he agreed to seek refuge in a 
soldiers' home, upon my urgence, and I lost sight of 
him for several years. When he reappeared, one sum- 
mer, at the seaside, as destitute as ever, and as threat- 
ening as ever in regard to his infirmity, it seemed that 
he had passed the time in working his way from one 
soldiers' home to another, in Maine and in New York, 
in Virginia and in Ohio, but everywhere, because of 
some informality in his papers, the gates were closed 
against him. I gave him a suit of clothes and some 
more money, and I thought I had done with him at 
last, for he said that now, as soon as he got his next 
pension money, he was going home to Germany, to 
spend his last years with his brother, — a surgeon, re- 
tired from the German army, — who could take care of 
him and his infirmity, and they could live cheaply to- 
gether, upon their joint pensions. I applauded so wise 
a plan, and we parted with expressions of mutual esteem. 



TRIBULATIONS OF A CHEERFUL GIVER. 173 

Two or three months later, after I had come from the 
seaside place, where he visited me, to New York for 
the winter, he presented himself again to me. Heaven 
knows how he had found me out, but there he was, 
with his infirmity, and his story was that now he had 
money enough to buy his steamer ticket to Hamburg, 
but that he lacked his railroad fare from Hamburg to 
the little village where his brother lived. His notion 
seemed to be that I should subscribe with others to 
supply the amount; but I had at last a gleam of 
worldly wisdom. I said I thought the subscription 
business had gone on long enough ; and he assented 
that it had at least gone on a good while. 

" Very well, then," I added; " you go now with the 
money you have for your steamer ticket, and buy it. 
Come back here with the ticket and I will not oblige you 
to wait till you can collect your railroad fare from dif- 
ferent people ; I will give you the whole of it myself." 

Will it be credited that this sufferer did not come 
back with his steamer ticket ? I have never seen him 
since, though a few weeks later I went to call upon 
him at the ten-cent hotel in the Bowery where he said 
he slept. The clerk said he was staying there, but he 
could not throw any light upon his intention of going 
back to Germany, for he had never heard him say 



174 IMPKBSSIONS AND EXPEKIENCES. 

anytMng about iti, He was out at tlie moment, like 
my romanticist Englishman. 

Whilst I lived in Boston I had a visit from another 
romanticistic Englishman, vi^ho professed to be no other 
than the cousin of Mr, Walter Besant, though he gave 
me reason to think he vi^as mistaken. It seems that 
he had arrived that very morning from Central Africa, 
and, for all I know, from the mystic presence of She 
herself. In that strange land, he wished me to believe, 
he had been a playwright and a journalist, but he 
really looked and spoke and smelled like a groom. 
He dropped his aspirates everywhere, and when he 
picked them up he put them on in the wrong places. 
In his parlance I was a bird of night, or several such, 
and I cannot rid myself now of the belated conjecture 
that he had possibly mistaken me for Mr. 'Aggard. 
He was a cheery little creature, however ; and when I 
put it to him, as between man and man, whether he 
did not think he was telliiig me a rather improbable 
story, he owned so sweetly he did that I could not 
help contributing to pay his expenses 'ome to Heng- 
land. He was not quite clear why he should have 
come round by way of Boston, but he said he would 
send me the money back directly he got 'ome. 

He did not do so, and my experience is that they 



TRIBULATIONS OF A CHEEEFTJL GIVER. 175 

never do so. They inay forget it, they may never be 
able to spare the money. Never? I am wrong. 
Only last winter I made my usual compromise with a 
man who asked ten, and lent him five ; and though he 
was yet another Englishman, and, for anything I can 
say, another romanticist, he returned my little loan with 
such a manly, honest letter that my heart smote me 
for not having made it ten. I looked upon his five- 
dollar bill as a gift from heaven, and I made haste to 
bestow it where I am sure it will never stand the re- 
motest chance of getti-Qg back to me. 

IX. 

I wish, sometimes, that they would not say they 
were going to send the money back ; but I wish this 
rather for tbfeir sake than for mine. I am pretty well 
inured to the disappointment sure to follow ; but I am 
afraid that the poor pretense demoralizes them, and, 
above all, I do not wish to demoralize them by my 
connivance. Once, when I was a visitor for the As- 
sociated Charities in Boston, the question came up in 
the weekly meeting whether, if one gave money when 
there was no hope of getting work, one ought to let 
the beneficiary suppose that one expected to get it 
back. Ought one to say that he was making his gift 



1T6 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

a loan ? Would it not be better to treat it frankly as 
a gift ? A man to -whose goodness I mentally uncover 
said lie had given that point some thought, and he be- 
lieved one ought not to pretend that it was a loan 
when it was not ; but one might fitly say, "I let you 
have this money. If you are ever able to give it back, 
I shall be glad to have you do so." It seems to mc 
that this is the wisest possible word on the subject. 

Of course the reason why we have such a bad con- 
science in giving is that we feel we ought not to pau- 
perize people. Perhaps this is one reason why wc 
give so little to obvious destitution. I am this mo- 
ment just in from the street, Avhere I gave alms to a 
one-armed tatterdemalion, with something of this ob- 
scure struggle in ray mind. As I came up with him, 
well fenced against the bitter Avind that blew through 
his ruins, I foresaw that I should give him something, 
and I took from my outside pocket all the change 
there was in it — three coppers, a nickel, and a piece 
of twenty-five. I was ashamed to give the coppers, 
and I felt that a good citizen ought not to give a quar- 
ter for fear of pauperizing a man who had already 
nothing in the world, and no hopeful appearance of 
being able to get anything. So I gave him the nickel, 
and I am not quite easy in my mind about it. 



TRIBULATIONS OF A CHEERFUL GIVER. 177 

Perhaps I was remotely influenced not to give a 
quarter to this one-armed man by the behavior of an- 
other one-armed man whom I befriended. I did give 
him a quarter, not from a good impulse, but because I 
had no smaller change, and it was that or nothing. 
The gift seemed to astound him. It was in a shoe- 
store, where I had only one boot on, in the process of 
trying a pair, and I was quite helpless against him 
when he burst into blessings of Irish picturesqueness, 
and ashed my name, apparently that he might pray 
for me without making a mistake in the address ; and 
when I said, from a natural bashfulness, or a mean 
fear that he might find me out at home and come again 
to beg of me, that I would take the chance of the an- 
swer of his prayers getting to me, he told me all about 
the railroad accident that lost him his arm ; and not 
content with this, he took his poor stump — as if to 
prove that it was real — and rubbed it over me, and 
blessed me and blessed me again, till I was quite 
ashamed of getting so much more than my money's 
worth. Shall I own that I began to fear this grateful 
man was not entirely sober ? 



178 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

x:. • • 

I dare say poverty and tli§ pangs of liunger and 
cold do not foster habits of strict temperance. It is 
a great pity they do not, since they are so common. 
If they did, they could do more than anything else to 
advance the cause of prohibition. Still, I will not 
say that all the poor I give to are in liquor at the mo- 
ment, or that drunkenness is peculiarly the vice of 
one-armed destitution. Neither is gratitude a very 
common or articulate emotion in my beneficiaries. 
They are mostly, if thankful at all, silently thankful ; 
and I find this in better taste. I do not believe that 
as a rule they are very imaginative, or at least so im- 
aginative as romantic novelists. Yet there was one 
sufferer came up the back elevator on a certain even- 
ing not long ago, and burst upon me suddenly, some- 
how as if he had come up through a trap in the stage, 
who seemed to have rather a gift in that way. He 
was most amusingly shabby and dirty (though I do 
not know why shabbiness and dirt should be amus- 
ing), with a cutaway coat worn down to its ultimate 
gloss, a frayed neckcloth, and the very foulest collar I 
can remember seeing. But he had a brisk and pleas- 
ing address, and I must say an excellent diction. He 
called me by name, and at once said that friends whom 



TRIBULATIONS OF A CHEERFIJL GIVER. 179 

he had expected to find in New York were most inop- 
portunely in Europe at this moment of his arrival from 
a protracted sojourn in the West. But he was very- 
anxious to get on that night to Hartford, and complete 
his journey home from Denver, where he had fallen a 
prey to the hard times in the very hour of the most 
prosperous speculation; and he proposed, as an in- 
ducement to a loan, borrowing only enough money to 
take him to New Haven by the boat — he would walk 
the rest of the way to Hartford. I no more believed 
him than I should believe a ghost if it said it was a 
ghost. But I believed that he was in want, — ^his 
clothes proved that, — and I gave him the little sum he 
asked. He said he would send it back the instant he 
reached Hartford ; and I am left to think that he has 
not yet arrived. But I am sure that even that brief 
moment of his airy and almost joyous companionship 
was worth the money. He was of an order of classic 
impostors dear to literature, and grown all too few in 
these times of hurry and fierce competition. I wish I 
had seen more of him, and yet I cannot say that I 
wish he would come back ; it might be embarassing 
for both of us. 

Not long before his visit I had a call from another 
imaginative person, whom I was not able to meet so 



180 IMPRESSIONS AND ESEPRIBNCBS. 

fully in her views. This was a middle-aged lady who 
said she had come on that morning from Boston to see 
me. She owned we had never met before, and that 
she was quite unknown to me ; but apparently she did 
not think this any bar to her asking me for two hun- 
dred and fifty dollars to aid in the education of her 
son. I confess that I was bewildered for a moment. 
My simple device of offering half the amount demand- 
ed would have been too costly : I really could not 
have afforded to give her one hundred and twenty-five 
dollars, even if she had been willing to compromise, 
which I was not sure of. I am afraid the reader will 
think I shirked. I said that I had a great many de- 
mands upon me, and I ended by refusing to give any- 
thing. I really do not know how I had the courage ; 
perhaps it was only frenzy. She insisted, with reasons 
for my giving which she laid before me ; but either 
they did not convince me, or I had hardened my heart 
so well that they could not prevail with me, and she 
got up and went away. As she went out of the room, 
she looked about its appointments, which I had not 
thought very luxurious before, and said that she saw 
I was able to live very comfortably, at any rate ; and 
left me to the mute reproach of my carpets and easy- 
chairs. 



TEIBTTLATIONS OF A CHEEKFUL GIVEE. 181 

I do Bot remember whether she alleged any inspira- 
tion in coming to see me for this good object ; but a 
summer or two since a lady came to me, at my hotel 
in the mountains, who said that she had been moved 
to do so by an impulse which seemed little short of 
mysticaL She said that she was not ordinarily super- 
stitious, but she had wakened that morning in Boston 
with my name the first thing in her thoughts, and it 
seemed so directly related to what she had in view 
that she could not resist the suggestion it conveyed 
that she should come at once to lay her scheme before 
me. She took a good deal of time to do this ; and 
romantic as it appeared, I felt sure that she was work- 
ing with real material. It was of a nature so complex, 
however, and on a scale so vast, that I should despair 
of getting it intelligibly before the reader, and I will 
not attempt it. I listened with the greatest interest ; 
but at the end I was obliged to say that I thought her 
mystical impulse was mistaken; I was sorry it had 
deceived her ; I was quite certain that I had not the 
means or the tastes to enter upon the aesthetic enter- 
prise which she proposed. In return, I suggested a 
number of millionaires whose notorious softness of 
heart, or whose wish to get themselves before the 
public by their good deeds, ought to make them more 



182 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

available, and we parted the best of friends. I am not 
yet quite able to make up my mind that sbe was not 
the victim of a hypnotic suggestion from the unseen 
world, and altogether innocent in her appeal to me. 

XL 

In fact, I am not able to think very ill even of im- 
postors. It is a great pity for them, and even a great 
shame, to go about deceiving people of means ; but I 
do not believe they are so numerous as people of 
means imagine. As a rule, I do not suppose they 
succeed for long, and their lives must be full of cares 
and anxieties, which of course one must not sympa- 
thize with, but which are real enough, nevertheless. 
People of means would do well to consider this, and 
at least not plume themselves very much upon not be- 
ing cheated. If they have means, it is perhaps part 
of the curse of money, or of that unfriendliness to 
riches which our religion is full of, that money should 
be got from them by unworthy persons. They have 
their little romantic superstitions, too. One of these 
is the belief that beggars are generally persons who 
will not work, and that they are often persons of se- 
cret wealth, which they constantly increase by preying 
upon the public. I take leave to doubt this altogether. 



TRIBULATIONS OF A CHEERFUL GIVER. 183 

Beggary appears to me in its conditions almost harder 
than any other trade ; and from what I have seen of 
the amount it earns, the return it makes is smaller 
than any other. I should not myself feel safe in re- 
fusing anything to a beggar upon the theory of a for- 
tune sewn into a mattress, to be discovered after the 
beggar has died intestate. I know that a great many 
good people pin their faith to such mattresses ; but I 
should be greatly surprised if one such could be dis- 
covered in the whole city of New York. On the other 
hand, I feel pretty sure that there are hundreds and 
even thousands of people who are insufficiently fed 
and clad in New York ; and if here and there one of 
these has the courage of his misery, and asks alms, 
one must not be too cocksure it is a sin to give to him. 
Of course one must not pauperize him : that ought 
by all means to be avoided ; I am always agreeing to 
that. But if he is already pauperized ; if we know by 
statistics and personal knowledge that there are hun- 
dreds and even thousands of people who cannot get 
work, and that they must suffer if they do not beg, let 
us not be too hard upon them. Let us refuse them 
kindly, and try not to see them ; for if we see their 
misery, and do not give, that demoralizes us. Come, 
I say ; have not we some rights, too ? No man strikes 



184 ISIPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

anotLer man a blow without becoming in sort and 

measure a devil ; and to see what looks like want, and 

to deny its prayer, has an effect upon the heart which 

is not less depraving. Perhaps it would be a fair 

division of the work if we let the deserving rich give 

only to the deserving poor, and kept the undeserving 

poor for ourselves, who, if we are not rich, are not 

deserving, either. 

XII. 

I should be sorry if anything I have said seemed 
to cast slight upon the organized efforts at relieving 
want, especially such as unite inquiry into the facts 
and the provision of work with the relief of want. 
All that I contend for is the right — or call it the priv- 
ilege — of giving to him that asketh, even when you do 
not know that he needs, or deserves to need. Both 
here and in Boston I have lent myself — sparingly and 
grudgingly, I'll own — to those organized efforts ; and 
I know how sincere and generous they are, how effect- 
ive they often are, how ineffective. They used to let 
me go mostly to the Italian folk who applied for aid 
in Boston, because I could more or less meet them in 
their own language ; but once they gave me a Russian 
to manage — I think because I was known to have a 
devotion for Tolstoy and for the other Russian novel- 



TRIBULATIONS OF A CHEEEFUL GIVEE, 185 

ists. The Russian in question was not a novelist, but 
a washer of bags in a sugar-refinery ; and at the time 
I went to make my first call upon him he had been 
" laid off," as the euphemism is, for two months; that 
is, he had been without work, and had been wholly 
dependent upon the allowance the charities made him. 
He had a wife and a complement of children — I do 
not know just how many ; but they all seemed to live 
in one attic room in the North End. I acquainted 
myself fully with the case, and went about looking for 
work in his behalf. In this, I think, I found my only 
use : but it was use to me only, for the people of 
whom I asked work for him treated me with much the 
same ignominy as if I had been seeking it for myself ; 
and it was well that I should learn just what the exas- 
perated mind of a fellow-being is when he is asked 
for work, and has none to give. He regards the ap- 
plicant as an oppressor, or at least an aggressor, and 
he is eager to get rid of him by bluntness, by coldness, 
even by rudeness. After the unavailing activity of a 
week or two, I myself began to resent the Russian's 
desire for work, and I visited him at longer and longer 
intervals to find whether he had got anything to do ; 
for he was looking after work, too. At last I let a 
month go by, and when I came he met me at the street 



186 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

door — or, say, alley door — of the tenement-liouse with 
a smiling face. He was always smiling, poor fellow, 
but now he smiled joyously. He had got a job — they 
always call it a job, and the Italians pronounce it a 
giohbe. His job was one which testified to the hetero- 
geneous character of American civilization in even 
amusing measure. The Jews had come into a neigh- 
boring street so thickly that they had crowded every 
one else out; they had bought the Congregational 
meeting-house, which they were turning into a syna- 
gogue, and they had given this orthodox Russian the 
job of knocking the nails out of the old woodwork. 
His only complaint was that the Jews would not let 
him work on Saturday, and the Christians would not 
let him work on Sunday, and so he could earn but five 
dollars a week. He did not blame me for my long 
failure to help him ; on the contrary, so far as I could 
make out from the limited vocabulary we enjoyed in 
common, he was grateful. But I have no doubt he 
was glad to be rid of me ; and Heaven knows how 
glad I was to be rid of him. 

I do not believe I ever found work for any one, 
though I tried diligently and I think not unwisely. 
Perhaps the best effect from my efforts was that they 
inspired the poor creatures to efforts of their own. 



TRIBULATIONS OF A CHEERFUL GIVER. 187 

wliicli were somej;imes successful. I had on my hands 
and heart for nearly a whole winter the most meritori- 
ous Italian family I ever knew, without being able to 
do anything but sympathize and offer secret alms in 
little gifts to the children. Once I got one of the 
boys a place in a book-store, but the law would not 
allow him to take it because he was not past the age 
of compulsory schooling. The father had a peripatetic 
fruit-stand, which he pushed about on a cart ; and his 
great aim was to get the privilege of stationing him- 
self at one of the railroad depots. I found that there 
were stations which were considered particularly desir- 
able by the fruiterers, and that the chief of these was 
in front of the old United States court-house. A fruit- 
erer out of place, whose family I visited for the char- 
ities, tried even to corrupt me, and promised me that 
if I would get him this stendio (they Italianize " stand" 
to that effect, just as they translate " bar " into harra, 
and so on) he would give me something outright. 
" E poi, ci sara sempre la mancia " (" And then there 
will always be the drink-money"). I lost an occasion 
to lecture him upon the duties of the citizen ; but I am 
not a ready speaker. 

The sole success — but it was very signal — of my 
winter's work was getting a young Italian into the hos- 



188 IMPRESSIONS AND ESPERIBNCES. 

pital. He had got a rlieumatic trouble of tlie heart 
from keeping a stendio in a cellarway, and when I saw 
him I thought it would be little use to get him into 
the hospital. The young doctor who had charge of 
him, and whom I looked up, was of the same mind. 
But I could not help trying for hun ; and when the 
sisters at the hospital (where he got well, in spite of 
all) said he could be received, I made favor for an 
ambulance to carry him to it. It was a beautiful 
white spring day when I went to tell him the hour the 
ambulance would call ; the sky was blue overhead, the 
canaries sang in their cages along the street. I left 
all this behind when I entered the dark, chill tenement- 
house, where that dveadiul poverty-smell stvnck the life 
out of the spring in my soul at the first breath. The 
sick man's apartment was clean and sweet, through his 
mother's care (this poor woman was as wholly a lady as 
any I have seen) ; but when I passed into his room, 
he clutched himself up from the bed, and stretched 
his arms toward me with gasps of '' Zo spedale, lo 
spedale!^'' The spring, the coming glory of this 
world, was nothing to him. It was the hospital he 
wanted ; and to the poor, to the incurable disease of 
our conditions, the hospital is the best we have to give. 
To be sure, there is also the grave. 



THE CLOSING OF THE HOTEL. 

It scarcely began before the last of August, wben 
the guests ebbed away by floods, in every train. The 
end of the season was purely conventional. One day 
the almanac said it was August, and the hotel was full ; 
another day the almanac said it was September, and 
the vast caravansary was instantly touched with deple- 
tion, and within a week it hung loose upon its inmates 
like the raiment upon the frame of a man who has 
been Banting. There was no change in the weather; 
that remained as summerlike as ever, and grew more 
and more divinely beautiful. The conditions contin- 
ued the same, only more agreeable ; the service was 
still abundant and perfect ; the table was of an unim- 
paired variety ; there was no such sudden revival of 
business or pleasure in the city that people should 
abandon the leisure of the sea-shore ; the ocean smiled 
as serenely, the breakers crashed as lyrically along the 
beach; the country, for those who were to prolong 



190 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

their outing, would be dry and dusty. But a certain 
fiction of the calendar had reported itself in the human 
consciousness ; and as men are the prey of superstition 
and emotion, the population of the huge hostelry 
yielded by a single impulse to the pressure of the pre- 
tence that it was September. 

I. 

Huge, I have called the hostelry, and I do not know 
that I can add to the effect of size which I wish to 
impart by saying that it is of a veritably American 
immensity. It stretches along the sea like the shore 
of a continent ; and when I walked from one end of 
its seaward veranda to the other, I felt as if I were 
going from Castine in Maine to St. Augustine in Flor- 
ida. Really, it is only the fifth of a mile in length, 
but I have ordinarily lived in houses so much shorter 
that my fancy takes wing when I think of it, and will 
not brook a briefer flight. In like manner, when I 
speak of its thousand dwellers as a population, I am 
perhaps giving way to an effect of habitually sharing 
my roof with four or five persons. 

They were nearly a thousand when I came, but the 
place was so spacious that I had large areas of the 
piazza to myself whenever I liked, and I was often a 



THE CLOSING OF THE HOTEL. 191 

solitary wayfarer up and down tlie halls that projected 
themselves in dimmer and dimmer perspective between 
the suites of rooms on the right hand and on the left. 
It was the dining-room, with its forest of pine posts, 
its labyrinth of tables, its army of black waiters, and 
its only a little larger army of guests, which gave that 
impression of a dense overpeopling, such as one could 
not feel in greater degree even in the tenement quar- 
ters of the East Side. This was peculiarly the case 
on a Sunday, when the guests had guests ; and in the 
tramp of the black forces, the clash of crockery, and 
the harsh jangle of the cutlery, mingled with the dull, 
subdued sound of the guttling and guzzling, there was 
something like the noise of a legion stirring in its har- 
ness, and hailing Cajsar with the warlike devotion 
inspired by a munificent donative. 

In the early morning there was a hardly less power- 
full impression of numbers, when the crying children, 
the half -hushed quarrelling of some husbands and 
wives, and the loud and loving adieux of others parting 
for the day, burst the frail partitions of their rooms, and 
mixed in the corridors with the rush of the porters' 
trunk-bearing trucks, pushed over the long carpeted 
stretches with the voluble clatter of so many lawn- 
mowers, the flight of the call-boys' feet, the fierce 



192 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

clangor of the chambermaids' bells, and the strongly 
brogued controversies and gossip of the chambermaids 
themselves. No doubt all these effects were exaggerated 
by the senses just unfolding themselves in the waking 
consciousness, and taking angry note of the disturbing 
influences without. But the multitude sheltered by a 
single roof was nevertheless very great : at the height 
of the season, the guests and the servants, the drones 
and the workers, were some fifteen hundred together. 

II. 

All at once, as I say, a great part of the multitude 
vanished. All at once, on the verandas, and in the 
wide ofiice swept with yet cooler currents from the 
sweet-breathed sea, I was sensible of a sudden deci- 
mation. I cannot fix the date with precision, but one 
night at about half -past eight the great moony electrics 
which swung in space high over the floors of the office, 
the ball-room, and the dining-room paled their effect- 
ual fires, which they never afterward relumed, and left 
us to the batlike waverings of the naphtha gas. I re- 
member the sinking of the heart with which my senses 
took cognizance of the fact. No one spoke, or audibly 
noted it ; the talking groups talked on in fallen tones ; 
the people who were reading books or papers drew 



THE CLOSING OF THE HOTEL. 193 

them a little nearer, or put them a little farther ; those 
who were writing letters at the long tables in the read- 
ing-room silently adjusted their vision to the obscurity. 
It was like the effect of some august natural catas- 
trophe; the general disposition was to ignore the 
fact, as we shall perhaps try to ignore the fact that 
the world has begun to burn up when it begins to 
burn, and pretend that it is merely a fire over in Ho- 
boken or Long Island City that the department will 
soon have under control. 

It may have been the morning of that day, or the 
morning of the next, but it was at least some neigh- 
boring morning, that I sauntered down to one of the 
forenoon trains and saw a large detachment of our 
colored troops departing. They were very gay, as they 
nearly always are, poor fellows ; and they were exchang- 
ing humorous and derisive adieux with a detachment 
of those who were to remain, and who pretended on 
their part to mock their departing comrades. These 
helped them off with their baggage, wheeling the 
heavy truck-loads of the trunks which the porters left 
to them ; and, when all was ready, shaking hands again 
and again, and telling them to be good to themselves. 
At the last moment a very short, stout, little black man 
appeared with a truck heaped high with baggage, and 
M 



194: IMPRESSIONS AND EXPBKIENCES. 

rashed it down the long esplanade to the platform 
beside the train, amid the wild cheers and wagers of 
the going and staying spectators. He had all the cry- 
till the train actually started, when a young colored 
brother burst out of the front door of a car from which 
it had detached itself, and began to run it down with 
a heavy grip-Sack flying wildly about and beating his 
legs and flanks. He had taken his place in this car 
unaware of its fate, and had remained in it, exulting 
from the open window in his sole possession ; and now 
the secret of his proprietorship had been revealed to 
his dismay. But it was a very kindly train ; when his 
pursuit became known, the locomotive obligingly 
slowed to a stand, and he Avas pulled aboard the rear 
platform amidst a jubilation which few real advantages 

inspire in this world. 

III. 

An indefinable gloom settled upon me as the train 
curved out into the marsh, and the laughing, chatter- 
ing, cheering, hat-waving remnant came back to the 
hotel and dispersed about their work. There were 
still a great many of them, and there were still a great 
many of us, but I felt that the end had begun. I do 
not know whether I felt this fact more keenly or not 
when the dentist, whose presence I had been tacitly 



THE CLOSING OF THE HOTEL. 195 

proud of all through August, abandoued the house 
which he had helped to render metropolitan. But I am 
sure that it was a definite shock to lose him ; and that 
the tooth which his presence had held in abeyance as- 
serted itself in a wild throe at his going. Once as I 
passed the door of his ofiice his name was on it and 
his hours ; when I returned fifteen minutes later to ask 
an appointment with him his name was gone, and the 
useless hours alone remained. On his way to take 
passage in his cat-boat for the farthermost parts of 
the Great South Bay, he kindly stopped and advised 
about the grumbling tooth. Then he passed out of 
the hotel, and left it to ache if it must, with an unre- 
quited longing for the filling fatally delayed. 

The doctor went a week later, but before this other 
changes had taken place, among which the most cata- 
clysmal was the passing of the band, which vanished 
as it were in a sudden crash of silence. The whole 
month long I had heard it playing in the afternoon 
midway of the long veranda, and in the evening on 
its platform in the ballroom, and with my imperfect 
knovrledge of music had waited each day and night 
till it came to that dissolute, melancholy melody to 
which the Eastern girls danced their wicked dance at 
the "World's Fair ; not because I like dissolute and 



196 IMPKBSSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

melanclioly things, but because I was tben able to 
make sure what tune the band was playing. I had in 
this way become used to the band, and I missed it 
poignantly, if one can miss a thing poignantly ; which 
I doubt. Other people seemed to enjoy it, and I like 
to see people enjoying themselves. Besides, its going 
brought the dancing to a close, which I enjoyed my- 
self. 

I mean that I enjoyed looking at the dancing. This 
was for the most part, even at the height of our gay- 
ety, performed by boys and girls, and very young 
children, whom I saw led away to bed heart-broken 
at nine o'clock. One small couple of these I loved 
very much. I fancied them a little brother and sister, 
and I delighted in their courage and perseverance in 
taking the floor for every dance, and through all 
changes of tune and figure turning solemnly round and 
round with their arms about each other's waists. One 
night there came a bad, bad boy, who posted himself 
in front of them, and plagued them, jumping up and 
down before them and hindering their serious gyration. 
Another evening the little brother was cross and would 
not dance, and the little sister had to pull him out on 
the floor and make him. 

Sometimes, however, there were even grown people 



THE CLOSING OF THE HOTEL. 197 

on the floor. Tlien I ciiose a very pretty young cou- 
ple, v/hom I called my couple, and shared their joy in 
the waltz without their knowing it. We were by all 
odds the best dancers and the best looking. We stayed 
long enough to poison the others with jealousy, but 
we always went away rather early. When the band 
left, all this innocent pleasure ended. There was one 
delirious evening, indeed, when the floor-manager, in 
default of other music, whistled a waltz, and the young 
ladies, in default of young men, trod a mad measure 
with each other to his sibilation. But this was a dy- 
ing burst of gayety : it did not and could not happen 
again. 

IV. 

I have to accuse myself of giving no just idea of 
the constant flowing and dribbling away of the guests, 
who never ceased departing. The trains that bore 
them and their baggage brought no others to replace 
them, and the house gradually emptied itself until not 
more than a poor three hundred remained. With 
each defection of a considerable number of guests 
there followed a reduction of the helping force, who 
now no longer departed laughing, but with a touch of 
that loneliness falling upon us all. It must be under- 



198 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

stood that we were all staying on in our closing hotel 
by sufferance. It closed officially on the 10th, but 
the landlord was to remain, and such guests as wished 
might remain too. This made us eager to linger till 
the very last moment we were allowed. 

Ever since the elevator had ceased to run, there had 
been a sense of doom in the air. One day we noted 
a fine reluctance in the elevator ; when people crowded 
it full, it would not go up. Then it began to waver 
under a few; it made false starts and stops, A placard 
presently said, "Elevator not running." Then this 
was removed, and the elevator ran again for a day or 
two. At last it ceased to run so finally that no placard 
was needed. The elevator boys went away ; it was as 
if the elevator were extinct. 

I think it was on the same day that the hall clock 
stopped. The clock was started again by the head 
porter, but after that the hotel ran on borrowed time. 
Once it borrowed the time of me, whose watch has 
not once been right in thirty-three years, a whole gen- 
eration ! 

The temperature of the water ceased to be reported 
even before the end of August ; the hours of high and 
low tide were no longer given. Twice when the re- 
porters came down to see the yacht-race off our beach 



THE CLOSING OF THE HOTEL. 199 

the bulletin-board was covered witb yellow telegrams 

from the coast where it was really seen, boasting the 

victory and triumphant defeat of the Defender. This 

quickened our pulses for the moment; and one night 

the ladies all put on their best dresses, and assembled 

for a progressive euchre party in the vast acreage of 

the parlor. It was a heroic but perhaps desperate act 

of gayety. 

V. 

One of the most striking natural phenomena of the 
hotel closing was the arrival of the gulls on our beach, 
or rather on the waters beyond the beacli. I had won- 
dered at their absence all August long, but punctually 
on the first day of September they came. The weather 
had not changed for them any more than it had for 
the guests who fled the place at the same date, but 
perhaps the wild wheeling and screaming things had a 
prescience of the autumnal storms, and came with 
prophetic welcome in their wings. 

Otherwise the premonitions of change were within 
the hotel itself, and they were more impressive when- 
ever they assumed an official character. It was with 
a real emotion that one day I missed one of the clerks 
out of the number within the office. He was there, 
and then he was not there ; it v/as as if he had been 



200 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

lost overboard, during his watch. I had scarcely re- 
covered from his loss when another clerk, upon whose 
distribution of the mail we all used to hang impatient 
for the equal disappointment of letters or no letters, 
ceased from his ministrations as if he had all along 
been a wraith of mist, and had simply melted away. 
The room clerk, who was a more definite personality 
to us, went next, with a less supernatural effect; he 
even said he might come back, but he did not come 
back, and the office force was reduced to the cashier 
and a young clerk not perceptible earlier in the season. 
At all great hotels the landlord is usually a remote 
and problematical personage, and so it was with ours 
until the office force began to thin away around him. 
Then he became more and more visible, tangible, con- 
versable, and proved a distinctly agreeable addition to 
our circle, in which the note of an increasing domes- 
ticity was struck. I do not know of anything that 
gave so keen a sense of our resolution into a single 
family, still large, but insensibly drawn together by 
the need of a mutual comfort and encouragement, as 
the invasion of the hotel by a multitude of crickets. 
Whether it was the departure of the human host which 
tempted the crickets in-doors, or whether it was some 
such instinct as brought the gulls to our seas, they 



THE CLOSING OF THE HOTEL. 201 

were all at once all over tlie place, piercing its deepen- 
ing silence witli their harsh stridulation. In the cham- 
bers they carked so loud and clear that one could 
hardly sleep for thena, and in the glooming reaches 
and expanses of the corridors, parlors, halls, and din- 
ing-room they shrilled in incessant chorus. 

VI. 

After the first moment, when the association with 
the home hearth and the simple fireside evenings of 
other days had spent itself, the crickets were rather 
awful, and personally I would rather have had the 
band back. But their weird music prompted a closer 
union of the guests, and our chairs were closer together 
on the veranda and in the oflBce. We found that we 
were very charming and interesting people, and I be- 
gan to wonder if I had not lost more than I could ever 
make good by not seeking the acquaintance of the 
seven hundred others who were gone. From day to 
day, from night to night, our numbers were lessened, 
but we never spoke of the departures ; we instinctively 
recognized that it would have been bad form ; we were 
like the garrison of a beleaguered city, that lost a few 
men by famine or foray from time to time, but kept up 
a heroic pretense that they were as many as ever. Or, 



202 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

we were like a shipwrecked crew clinging to a water- 
logged vessel, and caught from it now and then by a 
hungry shark or a hungry wave, or dropping away 
into the gulf from mere exhaustion. 

These figures are rather violent, and present only a 
subjective effect in the more sensitive spirits. As a 
matter of fact we lived luxuriously all the time. The 
time came when we heard that on a certain day the 
chef was going, but we should not have known he was 
gone by any difference in the table. It grew rather 
more attractive ; if there were fewer dishes, they were 
better cooked ; one could fancy a touch of personal 
attention in them, which one could not have fancied 
when we were seven hundred and fifty at table, and 
the help who served us were three hundred and fifty. 

VII. 

The help had gradually dwindled away till there 
were not more than fifty. I had kept my waiter 
through all ; he was a quiet elderly man of formed 
habits, whom I associated with the idea of permanency 
in every way, so that I could scarcely believe that we 
were to be parted. But one morning he was seized 
by the curious foreboding of departure which seemed 
really one of its symptoms among his tribe, and he 



THE CLOSING OF THE HOTEL. 203 

said he did not know but lie should be going soon. I 
said, Oh, I hoped not ; and he answered bravely that 
he hoped not too, but he shook his head, and we both 
felt that it was best to let a final half-dollar pass be- 
tween us in expression of a provisional farewell. 

That was indeed the last of him, and that day Avhen 
I came in to lunch I found that I was appointed an- 
other table, in another place, with another waiter to 
take my order. It was a little shock, but I was not 
unprepared. I had noted the gradual dismantling of 
the tables until now they stretched long rows of bar- 
ren surfaces down the tenth of a mile which the 
dining-room covered, and showed their reverberated 
labyrinth in the mirrors of the vast sideboards at either 
end of the hall. The remaining guests were snugly 
grouped on the seaward side of the room, where our 
tables commanded the marine views that I had long 
vainly envied others. 

But after the first transition I was changed to an- 
other table with another waiter, a tall student from 
Yale, who joined to a scholarly absence of mind con- 
cerning my wants an appreciation of my style of jokes 
that went far to console me, though I was not sure 
that it was quite decorous for him to laugh at them 
when they were addressed to others. I tried to 



204 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

grapple him to me with early and frequent donatives, 
and he would have been willing enough to stay ; but 
the guests kept going and the helpers were cut off, 
one by one, till the hour came when we both felt — 
" The first slight swerving of the heart 
That words are powerless to express. 
And leave it still unsaid in part, 
Or say it in too great excess." 
The next morning he told me he was going ; and as I 
sauntered down to take the train for a brief flight to 
New York, I saw him on the platform in citizen's 
dress and smoking a cigarette. He was laughing and 
joking with some of the waiters who still lingered, 
and bidding them take care of themselves, and prom- 
ising a like vigilance of his own welfare. 

After that there was the short interval of a single 
meal when I was served by a detached waiter, before 
I was handed over to the kindly helper who next had 
charge of me. I clung to him anxiously, for I did not 
know what day or hour I should lose him ; I did not 
know how soon he might lose me ! 

In the passing of the head porter there was some- 
thing deeply dramatic, almost tragic for me. We had 
become acquaintances, friends, even, I hope, and I 
had become sensible of the gradual disappearance of 
his subordinates until they were reduced to what I 



THE CLOSING OF THE HOTEL. 205 

may call the tail porter in contradistinction to tlie head 
porter. Then the head porter said that he had a great 
mind to be going himself ; but when I asked him why, 
he could not well say, and he agreed with me that it 
might be better for him to stay. We counted up the 
remaining families together, and found them twenty, 
and I convinced him that by the most modest com- 
putation here were twenty dollars in fees before him. 
I thought that I had secured his allegiance to the 
end, but the very morning before the pensive record 
of these events I went to look for him in his accus- 
tomed place to get my shoes " shined," and he was 
not there. The barber was there, looking in a vague 
disoccupation across the marshes to the northward of 
the hotel, and I asked him where the porter was. He 
closed his eyes that he might open his lips more im- 
pressively, and breathed the word, " Andato." 
" Gone ? " I echoed. 

The barber was a beautifully smiling, richly lan- 
guaged Sicilian, and he responded in an elegant sym- 
pathy with my dismay : " Si ; andato. Me ne vado 
anch' io, fra pochi giorni. M' impazzo qui. Guardi ! " 
(Yes ; gone. I am going, I myself, in a few days. I 
madden here. Look !) With the last word he touched 
my arm lightly to make me turn, and pointed to the 



206 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

long plank footway, stilted upon the marslies from one 
to the other side of the railroad curve, and leading to 
the boat-house on the bay beyond their wide levels. 
Midway of this I saw a solitary jBgure, whose lank 
length and forward droop I could not mistake. The 
departing porter looked like the last citizen abandoning 
the ruins of Persepolis, and I — I felt like Persepolis ! 

VIIL 

I strive, perhaps in vain, to impart a sense of the 
slowly creeping desolation, the gradual paresis, that 
was seizing upon the late full and happy life of our 
hotel ; and I have not strictly observed the order of 
the successive events. I have not spoken of the swift 
evanescence of the bell-boys, the first of whom began 
so jubilantly with me when I came, covenanting to 
deliver a pitcher of ice- water at my door every morn- 
ing at ten, and every evening at eight. He was faith- 
ful to his trust, and embarrassed me with a superfluity 
of ' ice- water, which ten men could hardly have drunk, 
and lived ; but when the economic frame of our hotel 
began to be shaken, he was early in warning me that 
he might go at any moment. He was No. 1 8, but he 
promised me that No. 10 would see that I was daily 
and nightly deluged with ice-water, and No. 10 was 



THE CLOSING OF THE HOTEL. 207 

exemplarily true to me for a day. Then he vanished 
too, with a grateful sense, I hope, of my folly in be- 
stowing a preliminary half-dollar upon him. But he 
had made interest for me, I found, with No. 4, and 
No. 4 deluded me by his fleeting permanency for a 
week. One morning he told me he was going, and he 
took a last half-dollar from me with a true compassion 
for my forlorn case. He was so visibly the last of 
the bell-boys that he could not assign me to a lower 
number. For one night the head porter brought my 
ice-water. Now the night porter brings it, and if he 
should leave before I do — But I will not anticipate, 
as the older romancers used to say. I will not look 
forward, even in the case of the chambermaids, of 
whom there have been already three changes, with the 
prospect next week of having in some of the laundry 
girls to do up the work. ' 

IX. 

The laundry itself was attacked ten days ago by the 
general paralysis of the hotel's functions, so far as the 
guests' linen was concerned, which has since had to 
be sent far inland by the enterprise of one of the 
bathing-pavilion men, and precariously returned on a 
variable date. I forget whether the laundry succumbed 



208 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

before or after the closing of tlie refresliment-room. 
The hotel sold no strong drinks, and the magnificent 
facilities of the bar were inadequately employed by a 
soda fountain, a variety of mineral waters in bottles, 
a supply of ginger ale, and lemons for lemonade. On 
an opposite counter were Huyler's candies, and a 
choice of chewing-gum ; the salubrious pepsin, or the 
merely innocent peppermint. When the moment for 
dismantling this festive place arrived, with the unex- 
pectedness of all the other moments of our slow de- 
habilitation, I was present, and saw the presiding 
genius packing up his stock of lemons. It gave me 
a peculiar pang. I had never bought any of them, or 
wanted any, but I had personally acquainted myself 
with almost every example of the fruit ; I knew those 
lemons apart, and from often study of them on their 
shelf, as I stood hardily sipping my ginger ale before 
the counter, I was almost as intimate with them as 
with the stock of the news-dealer. 

I must say that as to the books his stock was ter- 
ribly dull. He owned himself that it was dull, and 
when I asked him where in the world he got together 
such a lot of stupid books, he could only say that 
they were such as were appointed to be sold in sum- 
mer hotels by the news company. The newspapers 



THE CLOSING OF THE HOTEL. 209 

were rather better : if they were not livelier, they were 
lighter, or at least more ephemeral. I bought freely 
of them ; the dailies in the mornings, and the weeklies 
in the afternoons, with their longer leisure. I bought 
the magazines, which are now often as cheap as the 
papers, and, unlike the books, are seldom dull all 
through. Then I formed the intimacy of many illus- 
trated papers which I did not buy, but studied on the 
strings where they hung stretched high over the coun- 
ter. In one was the picture of a young lady habited 
in the mingled colors of Yale and Princeton, with a 
Cupid throwing a football at her heart. She was a great 
resource, and could not be stared out of countenance. 

Besides, there was on a wire frame over the show- 
case a platter, of native decoration, representing the 
whole of Long Island in a railroad map. It was a 
strangely ugly object, like some sort of sad, dissected 
fish, but fascinating. The news-dealer and I had often 
discussed its price, and I had invariably refused it at 
$1.25, though it was originally put upon the market 
at $2.50. 

After he had packed up his stock, I could hold out 
no longer. I looked about for him, and found him 
playing checkers with the ex-keeper of the refresh- 
ment-room. I asked him if that hideous platter had 
N 



210 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

now got down to a dollar, and he went and hunted it 
out of his stock. Upon inspection he seemed to dis- 
cover that it was still $1.25. In a desperation I paid 
the money; and almost at the same moment the news- 
dealer's place knew him no more, and I remained with 
my platter for a memorial of one of the weirdest ex- 
periences of a life which has not been barren of 

weirdness. 

X. 

" You ought to have seen an old-time closing of this 
hotel," said the clerk one evening toward the last. 
He had by this time resumed in his own person almost 
as many functions as the ancient mariner of the Bab 
Ballad who had eaten the former survivors of the 
Nancy brig, and claimed to represent them all by vir- 
tue of his superior appetite and digestion. Our clerk 
was now cashier, postmaster, room-clerk, night-clerk, 
and day-clerk, with moments of bell-boy; he spoke 
with authority, and we listened with the respect due 
to his manifold quality. 

" The guests," he continued, " would run down tow- 
ard the end of August to about two hundred. Then 
notice would be put up in the office, * The hotel will 
close to-morrow after breakfast.' The band would 
be still here, and the bell-boys all on duty ; and the 



THE CLOSING OF THE HOTEL. 211 

night before, all the guests would gather in the office. 
The band would play, and the talking and laughing 
would go on all through the evening, like the height 
of the season, and perhaps there would be a little 
dancing. Everybody would say good-night, the same 
as ever, and as soon as breakfast was over in the morn- 
ing you would see them streaming away to the train, 
till there wasn't a soul left in the house but clerks and 
the help. Then this stair carpet would come down 
with a run." He pointed to the wide stairway. 
" The rugs would come up all through the halls ; the 
dining-room would be cleared before you could look, 
and all the chairs would be on the tables with their 
legs in the air. The help would come to the desk in 
a steady file, and get their money and go. Before 
noon the cleaners would have the whole house to 
themselves." 

We owned that it must have been fine, that it was 
spectacular and impressive, even dramatic, but in our 
hearts we felt that there was a finer poetic quality in 
our closing, which was like one of the slow processes 
of nature, and emulated the pensive close of summer, 
when the leaves do not all fall in a night, or the flow- 
ers wither or the grass droop in a single day, but the 
trees slowly drop their crowns through many weeks, 



212 IMPEESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

and the successive frosts lay a chill touch on a blossom 
here, and a petal there, and the summer passes in a 
euthanasy which suffers you to say at no given mo- 
ment, "The summer is dead," till it has long been 
dead. 

Several aspects of the elementally simple landscape 
about us seemed peculiarly to sympathize with the 
quiet passing of the life of the great hotel. There 
could be no change in the long, irregular, gray sand 
dunes before it, which dropped themselves in lumpish 
masses, like the stretched and twisted shape of some 
vast bisected serpent. The stiff grasses and arid weeds 
that clothed them thinly, like a growth of dreadful 
green hair, kept their rigidity and their color with a 
sort of terrestrial immortality, or rather of an imper- 
ishable lif elessness ; but over them fluttered a multi- 
tude of butterflies, thick as the leaves of autumn, and 
of much the same ultimate color, like spirits already 
released to their palingenesis. Flights of others, of a 
gay white and yellow, like the innocent souls of little 
ones, haunted the leaf-plant beds before the hotel, or 
tried to make friends with the harsh little evergreens 
surviving the plantations of a more courageous period 
of the enterprise, and stolidly presenting a wood at 
the borders of the plank walks. To the landward the 



THE CLOSING OF THE HOTEL. 213 

mighty marshes stretched their innumerable acres to 
the sunrise and the sunset and the northern lights, one 
wash of pale yellow-green. Before we left, this began 
to be splashed as with flame or blood by the redden- 
ing of that certain small weed which loves the salt of 
tide-flooded meadows. The hollyhocklike bells of the 
marsh-roses drooped and fell, but other and gayer 
flowers, like ox-eye daisies of taller stem, came to re- 
place them ; and still, with the rising tide, the larger 
and the lesser craft that plied upon the many channels 
of the meadows blew softly back and forth, and seemed 
to sail upon their undulant grasses. 

In all, the large leisure, the serene lapse of nature 
toward decay, seemed to express a consciousness of 
the hotel's unhurried dissolution, to wait gently upon 
it, and to stay in a faithful summer loveliness till the 
last light should be quenched, of all those that had 
made it flame like a jewel in the forehead of the sea, 
and that had faded from veranda and balcony to the 
glitter of the clustered lamps in the office and dining- 
room. 

XI. 

There came, indeed, about the middle of September, 
a sudden rude shock of cold, which seemed to express 
an impatience with the dying hotel, hitherto unknown 



214 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

to the gently varying moods of nature. The wind blew 
for a day from the northwest, and stiffened its wasted 
and flaccid frame until one fancied its teeth chattering, 
as it were ; but even then the sea did not share the 
harsh sentiment of the inland weather. It lay smiling 
as serenely as ever, and the fleet of fishing sloops and 
schooners that began to flock before our beach about 
the end of August rocked and tilted, like things in a 
dream, as they had for the last fortnight. It was said 
that one of them dragged her anchor and came ashore 
in the night, but this happened in the dark, and we 
knew of it only by hearsay, after she had got off and 
sailed away. A day later they were all there again, 
and some flew in close to the beach, and skimmed 
back and forth, as fearless of its ever-shifting sands as 
the fish-hawks that sailed the deeps of blue air above 
them. 

The water remained as warm as ever ; warmer, they 
said, who tried it in a bath. I did not. The next to 
the last time I bathed I had for sole companion a lit- 
erary clergyman, with whom I walked down to the 
beach discussing the amusing aspects of the Ninth 
Crusade, which the Venetians so cannily turned aside 
from the conquest of the Holy Land to the conquest 
of Constantinople. The New York Dump was un- 



THE CLOSING OF THE HOTEL. 215 

pleasantly evident in tlie sea that day; and the last 
time the Dump had the sea all to itself. It is not 
agreeable to bathe among old brooms, bottles, decayed 
fruit, trunk lids, vegetable cans, broken boxes, and 
the other refuse of the ash-barrel, and I came out al- 
most before the life-guard could get ready to throw 
me a life-preserver. 

He was not the gaudy giant of bronze who posed 
between the life-lines at the height of the bathing-sea- 
son, when twoscore spectators on the benches provided 
for them watched a half-dozen men and women wel- 
tering in the surf, or popping up and down after the 
manner of ladies taking a sea-bath. But I dare say 
he was quite as efficient, and as I had the good for- 
tune to make his acquaintance, I liked him better. I 
specially liked his pelting about the bathing-pavilion 
before he went on duty with me, in his bare legs and 
feet, and wearing over his bathing-tights a cut-away 
coat, with a derby hat, to complete his ceremonial 
costume. 

He was not so much in keeping with the inlander's 
ideal of bathing-beaches, where summer girls float in 
the waves or loll upon the sands in the flirtatious poses 
familiar to the observer of them in the illustrated pa- 
pers. To guard these daring maids from the dangers 



216 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

of the deep the gaudy bronze giant, with his yachting 
cap, his black jerseys, his white shoes, and his brown 
arms folded upon his breast, where they half revealed, 
half hid his label of Life-Guard, was a far fitter figure. 
But for the real bathers, I think the guard in the cut- 
away, derby, and bare feet was much more to be 
trusted ; he was simple, substantial, and unpretentious ; 
and surf-bathing, let me whisper in the innumerable 
ear of the inland myriads who have never seen it, is 
not often the gay frolic they have fancied : rather, it 
is sober, serious, sloppy. 

XII. 

At first the mental frame of us lingerers in the clos- 
ing hotel was one of heroic self -applause. We wore a 
brave and smiling front ; we said it was so much nicer 
than when the house was full, than when there were a 
thousand or even a hundred in it ; and we all declared 
that we were going to stay as long as the landlord 
Avould let us. But from time to time there were de- 
fections; one table after another was dismantled ; face 
after face vanished ; first a white face, then a black 
face. I do not think we were so smiling after four of 
the beach trains were taken off ; secretly, I think each 
of us wondered, What if we should stay till the last 



THE CLOSING OF THE HOTEL. 217 

train was taken off, and we could not get away ! What 
should we do then ? 

We have become rather more serious; we do not 
talk trivially when we talk, and we scarcely talk at all ; 
we have traversed each other's conversable territory so 
often that there is no longer the hope of discovery in 
it. We have not only become serious ; I have reached 
the point where I have asked in thought if we are not 
a little absurd. Why should we stay ? What is keep- 
ing us ? The waves of autumn will soon reach the 
kitchen fires ; and then ? 

Last night, our waiter said he was going on Monday. 
This morning the newsboy passed through the office 
on his way to serve the cottagers with the papers. 
Asked if he were not going to serve the hotel guests, 
he went on without answering. It may be because he 
is an officer of a railroad, whose officers reluctantly 
answer questions ; but perhaps he has come to feel a 
ghostly quality in us, and regards us as so many sim- 
ulacra incapable of interest in the affairs of real men. 

The gas was not lighted in the ballroom after dinner 
yesterday ; the halls gloomed like illimitable caverns 
late in the gathered dusk. 

Shall I be able to stay till Friday ? We shall see. 



218 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

XIII. 

A most resplendent Sunday is passing. The cold 
wind of last night has blown the whole world clean of 
clouds. One has a sense of the globe swinging in 
depths of translucent ether, stainless through all the 
reaches of space. 

The sea is blue as the sky. It quivers where the 

sun slants upon it, and reflects the rays from myriad 

facets of steel. You cannot look at it long there, but 

now you begin to understand what Tennyson meant 

when he called it 
"The million-spangled sapphire marriage-ring of the land." 

All day yesterday, which was the great day for the 
arriving European steamers, they came hurrying in. 
We counted ten or twelve, each blocking the length 
of an express train out of the rim of the horizon. To- 
day there are none : only a few f ar-ofi full-sailed ships, 
and nearer shore the fleet of fishing sloops and 
schooners, tilting and swaying, and now and then fly- 
ing in so close to the beach that we can see the men 
on board, and trailiug their small boats through a 
drift of foamy sea. 

There are twenty-three guests in the house now — 
the house that holds a thousand ! Two hunters came 
down with their guns Friday night, and re-enforced 



THE CLOSING OF THE HOTEL. 219 

US. After breakfast a gay group gathered on tlie great 
midmost stairway of the veranda, and one of the men 
told the ladies stories and made them laugh. Every 
one is acquainted now, and speaks freely to every one 
else. It is rather weird. Should we be so civil if we 
were normally conditioned ? 

We have a very good two-o'clock dinner: the cook 
still remembers it is Sunday. After dinner two of us 
go down to the bathing-beach, and from the spectators' 
benches watch a soft-shell crab which has been bath- 
ing, and is now lying in the warm sand where the 
rising tide has flung him. We wait to see it reach 
him again, and draw him back, but it does not. It 
seems to me that he is unhappy in the sun, and I take 
a stick and tilt him into the sea. I do not know 
whether he likes that either ; but he cannot help him- 
self. He could not help himself in the sun. 

XIV. 

It is Monday morning now, and the world is wrapped 
in cold gray clouds, which seem to have meant some- 
thing unpleasant to the fishing craft, for they have all 
vanished but two of the bolder sail. It rains a little 
and then stops. A wind, heavy with the salt breath 
of the sea, rises steadily, and bemoans itself in all the 



220 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

angles and projections of the house. The lanterns of 
the veranda, which have not been lighted for a week, 
rattle dolefully in the blast. Under them, the long 
line of rocking-chairs in which a quarter of a mile of 
ladies used to sit and gossip together stretches emptily 
away. The wind pushes against the tall backs of the 
chairs, and they rock softly to and fro, as if the ghosts 
of the gossipers invisibly filled them, and still in- 
audibly babbled on. Where some of the chairs are 
grouped facing one another, the effect is very creepy. 
"Will they keep up their spectral colloquies all winter ? 

I escape from this eery sight to my own room, and 
in the corridor, three uptown blocks away, I behold a 
small chambermaid balancing herself against a large 
bucket as she wavers slowly down. It is tragic. 

The wind rises, and by mid-afternoon blows half a 
gale. The sea froths and roars and tumbles on the 
beach, and far out the serried breakers toss their 
white-caps against the sky-line, like so many cooks 
abandoning the hotel kitchen. 

About three o'clock, the life-guard of the bathing- 
beach, having cast his derby and cut-away, appears 
with three other men in tights, and pulls in the life- 
lines and the buoys. Now the Dump will have the 
ocean for its own. 



THE CLOSING OF THE HOTEL. 221 

A stranded boat which lies on the beach to the 
northward came ashore in the gale last night from 
some of the fishermen. It is in good condition, and 
if the trains should stop running before noon to-mor- 
row we can be taken off in it. Eighteen of our num- 
ber went away this morning; and there are now but 
four of us left. We could easily get away in that 

boat. 

XV. 

The wind rose till nightfall, and then its passion 
broke in tears. A tempestuous night threatened ; but 
the weather changed its mind as swiftly as a woman, 
and the day dawned as sweetly and softly this morn- 
ing as a day of young June. The sea is again a 
shining level, veiled in a tender mist. Out of this the 
fishing sail come stealing silently one after another till 
again a fleet of them is tilting and swaying in front of 
the hotel. One large, goblin sail, which remained 
throughout the threats of the weather, looks like the 
picture of the goblin in the Bab Ballad which tries to 
frighten the image before the tobacconist's shop. 

The gang of Italians who have toiled for three 
months to hide the infamies of the Dump, burying 
them in the sand as fast as the sea cast them ashore, 
are taking up the plank walks to the bathing-beach. 



222 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

The season is over. The barrel, wMcli formed the 
outermost buoy, swings monumentally (if monuments 
can swing) at anchor among the breakers. 

At the station the railroad people have become un- 
naturally amiable. They call me by name ; they take 
a personal interest in getting off my telegrams and 
express packages. In one of my visits to them, I 
meet the life-guard in full citizen's dress, with even 
shoes on. He salutes me, but I have to look twice 

before I know him. 

XVI. 

A generous contention has arisen between ourselves 
and the other remaining family as to which shall be 
last to leave the hotel. They go on the 10.25, and 
we have outstayed them ! We are the last guests in 
the house. The landlord's Italian greyhound seems 
instinctively to feel our pathetic distinction. He 
rushes upon me from far down the veranda, and fawns 
upon me. 

The cook and a last helper of some unknown func- 
tion carry our trunks to the station. But it has now 
suddenly become a question whether we shall go on 
the 12.20 or wait for the 5.20. It depends finally 
upon our getting a last lunch at the restaurant of the 
bathing-beach. We ask, limiting our demands to a 



THE CLOSING OF THE HOTEL. 223 

clam chowder. We are answered that there are still 
clams, but the man wlio knows how to make chowder 
is gone. The restaurant family are going to lunch 
upon a ham bone, which is now being scraped for 
them. We refuse to share it with many thanks, and 
decide to go on the 12.20. 

I have paid my last bill. 

On the 10th of August a pomp of liveried menials 
met me as I alighted from the train, and contended 
for the honor and profit of carrying my umbrella into 
the hotel. 

On the lYth of September I myself carry a heavy 
satchel in each hand out through the echoing corridors 
down the wide veranda stairs to the train, unattended 
by a single fee-taker. 

The hotel is closed. 



GLIMPSES OF CENTRAL PARK. 

This morning, as I sat on a bench in one of the 
most frequented walks of Central Park, I could almost 
have touched the sparrows on the sprays about me; 
a squirrel, foraging for nuts, climbed on my knees, as 
if to explore my pockets. Of course, there is a po- 
liceman at every turn to see that no wrong is done 
these pretty creatures, and that no sort of trespass is 
committed by any in the domain of all ; but I like to 
think that the security and immunity of the Park is 
proof of something besides the vigilance of its guard- 
ians ; that it is a hint of a growing sense in Amer- 
icans that what is common is the personal charge of 
every one in the community. 

As I turn from my page and look out upon it, I see 
the domes and spires of its foliage beginning to feel 
the autumn and taking on the wonderful sunset tints 
of the year in its decline ; when I stray through its 
pleasant paths, I feel the pathos of the tender October 



GLIMPSES OF CENTRAL PARK. 225 

air ; but, better than these sensuous delights, in every- 
thing of it and in it, I imagine a prophecy of the 
truer state which I believe America is destined yet to 
see established. It cannot be that the countless 
thousands who continually visit it, and share equally 
in its beauty, can all come away insensible of the 
meaning of it; here and there some one must ask 
himself, and then ask others, why the whole of life 
should not be as generous and as just as this part of 
it ; why he should not have a country as palpably his 
own as the Central Park is, where his ownership ex- 
cludes the ownership of no other. Some workman 
out of work, as he trudges aimlessly through its paths 
must wonder why the city cannot minister to his need 
as well as his pleasure, and not hold aloof from him 
till he is thrown a pauper on its fitful charities. If it 
can give him this magnificent garden for his forced 
leisure, why cannot it give him a shop where he can 
go in extremity, to earn his bread? 

I. 

I may be mistaken. His thoughts may never take 
this turn at all. The poor are slaves of habit, they 
bear what they have borne, they suffer on from gen- 
eration to generation, and seem to look for nothing 
O 



226 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

different. But this is wliat I think for poor people in 
the Park, not alone for the workman recently out of 
work, but for the workman so long out of it that he 
has rotted into one of the sodden tramps whom I meet 
now and then, looking like some forlorn wild beast, in 
the light of the autumnal leaves. That is the great 
trouble in New York ; you cannot anywhere get away 
from the misery of life. You would think that the 
rich for their own sakes would wish to see conditions 
bettered, so that they might not be confronted at every 
turn by the mere loathliness of poverty. But they 
likewise are the slaves of habit, and go the way the 
rich have gone since the beginning of time. Some- 
times I think that as Shakespeare says of the living 
and the dead, the rich and the poor are " but as pict- 
ures " to one another, without vital reality. 

Sometimes I am glad to lose the sense of their real- 
ity, and this is why I Avould rather walk in the path- 
ways of the Park than in the streets of the city, for 
the contrasts there are not so frequent, if they are glar- 
ing still. I do get away from them now and then, for 
a moment or two, and give myself wholly up to the 
delight of the place. It has been treated with the ar- 
tistic sense which always finds its best expression in 
the service of the community, but I do not think we 



GLIMPSES OF CENTRAL PARK. 227 

generally understaxid tMs, the civic spirit is so weak 
in us yet; and I doubt if the artists themselves are 
conscious of it, they are so rarely given the chance to 
serve the community. When this chance offers, how- 
ever, it finds the right man to profit by it, as in the 
system of parks at Chicago, the gardened spaces at 
Washington, and the Central Park in IN'ew York. 
Some of the decorative features here are bad, the 
sculpture is often foolish or worse, and the architec- 
ture is the outgrowth of a mood, where it is not merely 
puerile. The footways have been asphalted, and this 
is out of keeping with the rustic character of the place, 
but the whole design, and much of the detail in the 
treatment of the landscape, bears the stamp of a kindly 
and poetic genius. The Park is in no wise taken away 
from nature, but is rendered back to her, when all 
has been done to beautify it, an American woodland, 
breaking into meadows, here and there, and brightened 
with pools and ponds lurking among rude masses of 
rock, and gleaming between leafy knolls and grassy 
levels. It stretches and widens away, mile after mile, 
in the heart of the city, a memory of the land as it 
was before the havoc of the city began, and giving to 
the city -prisoned poor an image of what the free coun- 
try still is, everywhere. It is all penetrated by well- 



228 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

kept drives and paths ; and it is in these paths that I 
find my pleasure. They are very simple woodland 
paths, but for the asphalt ; though here and there an 
eSect of art is studied vrith charming felicity ; and I 
like to mount some steps graded in the rock at one 
place and come upon a plinth supporting the bust of a 
poet, as I might in an old Italian garden. But there 
.is otherwise very little effect of gardening except near 
the large fountain by the principal lake where there is 
some flare of flowers on the sloping lawns. There is 
an excess in the viaduct, with its sweeping stairways, 
and carven freestone massiveness ; but it is charming 
in a way, too, and the basin of the fountain is full of 
lotuses and papyrus reeds, so that you do not much 
notice the bronze angel atop, who seems to be holding 
her skirt to one side and picking her steps, and to be 
rather afraid of falling into the water. There is, in 
fact, only one thoroughly good piece of sculpture in 
the Park, which I am glad to find in sympathy with 
the primeval suggestiveness of the landscape garden- 
ing : an American Indian hunting with his dog, as the 
Indians must have hunted through the wilds here be- 
fore the white men came. 



GLIMPSES OF CENTRAL PARK. 229 

11. 

This group is always a great pleasure to me, from 
whatever point I come upon it, or catch a glimpse of 
it ; and I like to go and find the dog's prototype in 
the wolves at the menagerie which the city offers 
free to the wonder of the crowds constantly thronging 
its grounds and houses. The captive brutes seem to 
be of that solidarity of good-fellowship which unites 
all the frequenters of the Park ; the tigers and the 
stupidly majestic lions have an air different to me 
from tigers and lions shown for profit. Among the 
milder sorts, I do not care so much for the wallowing 
hippopotamuses, and the lumbering elephants, and the 
supercilious camels which one sees in menageries 
everywhere, as for those types which represent a peri- 
od as extinct as that of the American pioneers ; I have 
rather a preference for going and musing upon the 
ragged bison pair as they stand with their livid mouths 
open at the pale of their paddock, expecting the chil- 
dren's peanuts, and unconscious of their importance 
as survivors of the untold millions of their kind which 
a quarter of a century ago blackened the Western plains 
for miles and miles. There are now only some forty 
or fifty left ; for of all the forces of our plutocratic 
conditions, so few are conservative that the American 



230 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

buffalo is as rare as the old-fashioned American me- 
chanic, proud of his independence, and glorying in his 
citizenship. 

In some other enclosures are pairs of beautiful deer, 
which I wish might be enlarged to the whole extent 
of the Park. But I can only imagine them on the 
great sweeps of grass, which recall the savannahs and 
prairies, though there is a very satisfactory flock of 
sheep which nibbles the herbage there, when these 
spaces are not thrown open to the ball-players who 
are allowed on certain days of the week. I like to 
watch them, and so do great numbers of other fre- 
quenters of the Park, apparently ; and when I have 
v>^alked far up beyond the reservoirs of city-water, 
which serve the purpose of natural lakes in the land- 
scape, I like to come upon that expanse in the heart of 
the woods where the tennis-players have stretched their 
nets over a score of courts, and the art students have 
set up their easels on the edges of the lawns, for what 
effect of the autumnal foliage they have the luck or 
the skill to get. It is all very sweet and friendly, and 
in keeping with the purpose of the Park, and its frank 
and simple treatment throughout. 



GLIMPSES OF CENTKAL PARK. 231 

III. 

I think this treatment is best for the greatest num- 
ber of those who visit the place, and for whom the 
aspect of simple nature is the thing to be desired. 
Their pleasure in it, as far as the children are con- 
cerned, is visible and audible enough, but I like, as I 
stroll along, to note the quiet comfort which the elder 
people take in this domain of theirs, as they sit on the 
benches in the woodland ways, or under the arching 
trees of the Mall, unmolested by the company of some 
of the worst of all the bad statues in the world. They 
are mostly foreigners, I believe, but I find every now 
and then an American among them, who has released 
himself, or has been forced by want of work, to share 
their leisure for the time ; I fancy he has always a bad 
conscience, if he is taking the time off, from the con- 
tinual pressure of our duty to add dollar to dollar, and 
provide for the future as well as the present need. 
The foreigner, who has been bred up without the 
American's hope of advancement, has not his anxiety, 
and is a happier man, so far as that goes ; but the Park 
imparts something of its peace to every one, even to 
some of the people who drive, and form a spectacle 
for those who walk. 

For me they all unite to form a spectacle I never 



232 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

cease to marvel at, witli a perpetual hunger of conject- 
ure as to what they really think of one another. Ap- 
parently, they are all, whether they walk or whether 
they drive, willing collectively, if not individually, to 
go on forever in the economy which perpetuates their 
inequality, and makes a mock of the polity which 
assures them their liberty. The difference which 
money creates among men is always preposterous, and 
whenever I take my eyes from it the thing ceases to 
be credible ; yet this difference is what the vast major- 
ity of Americans have agreed to accept forever as 
right and justice. If I were to go and sit beside some 
poor man in the Park, and ask him why a man no 
better than he was driving before him in a luxurious 
carriage, he would say that the other man had the 
money to do it; and he would really think he had 
given me a reason ; the man in the carriage himself 
could not regard the answer as more full and final than 
the man on the bench. They have both been reared 
in the belief that it is a sufficient answer, and they 
would both regard me with the same misgiving if I 
ventured to say that it was not a reason ; for if their 
positions were to be at once reversed, they would both 
acquiesce in the moral outlawry of their inequality. 
The man on foot would think it had simply come his 



GLIMPSES OF CENTEAIi PARK. 233 

turn to drive in a carriage, and the man wliom lie 
ousted would think it was rather hard hick, but he 
would realize that it was what, at the bottom of his 
heart, he had always expected. 

Only once have I happened to find any one who 
questioned the situation from a standpoint outside of 
it, and that was a shabbily dressed man whom I over- 
heard talking to a poor woman in one of those pleas- 
ant arbors which crown certain points of rising ground 
in the Park. She had a paper bundle on the seat 
beside her, and she looked like some working-woman 
out of place, with that hapless, wistful air which 
such people often have. Her poor little hands, which 
lay in her lap, were stiffened and hardened with work, 
but they were clean, except for the black of the 
nails, and she was very decently clad in garments be- 
ginning to fray into rags ; she had a good, kind, faith- 
ful face, and she listened without rancor to the man 
as he unfolded the truth to her concerning the condi- 
tions in which they lived. It was the wisdom of the 
poor, hopeless, joyless, as it now and then makes it- 
self heard in the process of the years and ages, and 
then sinks again into silence. He showed her how 
she had no permanent place in the economy, not be- 
cause she had momentarily lost work, but because in 



234: IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIBNCES. 

the nature of things as we have them, it could only be 
a question of time when she must be thrown out of 
any place she found. He blamed no one; he only 
blamed the conditions. I doubt whether his wisdom 
made the friendless woman happier, but I could not 
have gainsaid it, when he saw me listening, if he had 
asked, " Isn't that the truth ? " I left him talking 
sadly on, and I never saw him again. He was thread- 
bare, but he too was cleanly and decent in his dress, 
and not at all of that type of agitators of whom we 
have made an effigy like nothing I have seen, as if 
merely for the childish pleasure of reviling it. 

IV. 

The whole incident was infinitely pathetic to me ; 
and yet we must not romance the poor, or imagine 
that they are morally better than the rich ; we must 
not fancy that a poor man, when he ceases to be a 
poor man, would be kinder for having been poor. He 
would perhaps oftener, and certainly more logically, 
be unkinder, for there would be mixed with his van- 
ity of possession a quality of cruel fear, an apprehen- 
sion of loss, which the man who had always been rich 
would not feel. The self-made man when he has made 
himself of money, seems to have been deformed by 



GLIMPSES OF CENTRAL PARK. 235 

his original destitution, and I think that if I were in 
need I would rather take my chance of pity from the 
man who had never been poor. Of course, this is 
generalization, and there are instances to the contrary, 
which at once occur to me. But what is absolutely 
true is that our prosperity, the selfish joy of having, 
at the necessary cost of those who cannot have, is 
blighted by the feeling of insecurity which every 
man has in his secret soul, and which the man who 
has known want must have in greater measure than 
the man who has never known want. 

There is, indeed, no security for wealth, which we 
think the chief good of life, in the system that war- 
rants it. When a man has gathered his millions, he 
cannot be reduced to want, probably ; but while he is 
amassing them, while he is in the midst of the fight, or 
the game, as most men are, there are ninety-five chances 
out of a hundred that he will be beaten. Perhaps it is 
best so, and I should be glad it was so if I could be 
sure that the common danger bred a common kindness 
between the rich and the poor, but it seems not to do 
so. As far as I can see, the rule of chance, which 
they all live under, does nothing more than reduce 
them to a community of anxieties. 

To the eye of the observer they have the monotony 



236 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

of the sea, wliere some tenth wave runs a little higher 
than the rest, but sinks at last, or breaks upon the 
rocks or sands, as inevitably as the other nine. Our 
inequality is without picturesqueness and without dis- 
tinction. The people in the carriages are better 
dressed than those on foot, especially the women ; but 
otherwise they do not greatly differ from the most of 
these. The spectacle of the driving in the Park has 
none of that dignity which characterizes such specta- 
cles in European capitals. This may be because many 
people of the finest social quality are seldom seen 
there, or it may be because the differences growing out 
of money can never have the effect of those growing 
out of birth ; that a plutocracy can never have the last 
wicked grace of an aristocracy. It would be impos- 
sible for instance, to weave any romance about the 
figures you see in our carriages ; they do not even 
suggest the poetry of ages of prescriptive wrong ; they 
are of to-day, and there is no guessing whether they 
will be of to-morrow or not. 

In Europe, this sort of tragi-comedy is at least well 
played; but in America, you always have the feeling 
that the performance is that of second-rate amateurs, 
who, if they would really live out the life implied by 
America, would be the superiors of the whole world. 



GLIMPSES OF CENTRAL PAKK. 237 

I am moved to laughter by some of the things I see 
among them, when perhaps I ought to be awed, as, 
for instance, by the sight of a little, lavishly dressed 
lady, lolling in the corner of a ponderous landau, with 
the efEect of holding fast lest she should be shaken 
out of it, while two powerful horses, in jingling, sil- 
ver-plated harness, with due equipment of coachman 
and footman, seated on their bright-buttoned overcoats 
on the box together, get her majestically over the 
ground at a slow trot. This is what I sometimes see, 
with not so much reverence as I feel for the simple 
mother pushing her baby-carriage on the asphalt be- 
side me and doubtless envying the wonderful creature 
in the landau. Sometimes it is a fat old man in the 
landau ; or a husband and wife, not speaking ; or a 
pair of grim old ladies, who look as if they had lived 
so long aloof from their unluckier sisters that they 
could not be too severe with the mere sight of them. 
Generally speaking, the people in the carriages do not 
seem any happier for being there, though I have some- 
times seen a jolly party of strangers in a public car- 
riage, drawn by those broken-kneed horses which 
seem peculiarly devoted to this service. 

The best place to see the driving is at a point where 
the different driveways converge, not far from the 



238 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

Egyptian obelisk "whicli the Khedive gave us some 
years ago, and which we have set up here in one of 
the finest eminences of the Park. He had of course 
no moral right to rob his miserable land of any one of 
its characteristic monuments, but I do not know that 
it is not as well in New York as in Alexandria. If its 
heart of aged stone could feel the continuity of con- 
ditions, it must be aware of the essential unity of 
the civilizations beside the Nile and beside the 
Hudson ; and if Cleopatra's needle had really an eye 
to see, it must perceive that there is nothing truly 
civic in either. As the tide of dissatisfied and weary 
wealth rolls by its base here, in the fantastic variety 
of its equipages, does the needle discern so much 
difference between their occupants and the occupants 
of the chariots that swept beneath it in the capital of 
the Ptolemies two thousand years ago ? I can imag- 
ine it at times winking such an eye and cocking in 
derision the gilded cap with which the New-Yorkers 
have lately crowned it. They pass it in all kinds of 
vehicles, and there are all kinds of people in them, 
though there are sometimes no people at all, as when 
the servants have been sent out to exercise the horses, 
for nobody's good or pleasure, and in the spirit of that 
atrocious waste which runs through our whole life. I 



GLIMPSES OF CENTRAL PARK. 239 

have now and then, seen a gentleman driving a four- 
in-hand, with everything to minister to his vanity in 
the exact imitation of a nohleman driving a four-in- 
hand over English roads, and with no one to be drawn 
by his crop-tailed bays or blacks except himself and 
the solenm groom on his perch; I have wondered 
how much more nearly equal they were in their 
aspirations and instincts than either of them imagined. 
A gentleman driving a pair, abreast or tandem, with a 
groom on the rumble, for no purpose except to express 
his quality, is a common sight enough ; and sometimes 
you see a lady illustrating her consequence in like 
manner. A lady driving, while a gentleman occupies 
the seat behind her, is a sight which always affects me 
like the sight of a man taking a woman's arm, in walk- 
ing, as the man of an underbred sort is apt to do. 

Horsey-looking women, who are, to ladies at least, 
what horsey-looking men are to gentlemen, drive 
together ; often they are really ladies, and sometimes 
they are nice young girls, out for an innocent dash 
and chat. They are all very much and very unim- 
pressively dressed, whether they sit in state behind 
the regulation coachman and footman, or handle the 
reins themselves. Now and then you see a lady with 
a dog on the seat beside her, for an airing, but not 



240 IMPKESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

often a child ; once or twice I liave seen one with a 
large spaniel seated comfortably in front of her, and 
I have asked myself what would happen if, instead of 
the dog, she had taken into her carriage some pale 
woman or weary old man, such as I sometimes see 
gazing patiently after her. But the thing would be 
altogether impossible. I should be the first to feel 
the want of keeping in it ; for, however recent wealth 
may be here, it has equipped itself with all the appa- 
ratus of long-inherited riches, which it is as strongly 
bound to maintain intact as if it were really old and 
hereditary — perhaps more strongly. I must say that, 
mostly, its owners look very tired of it, or of some- 
thing, in public, and that our American plutocrats, if 
they have not the distinction of an aristocracy, have 
at least the ennui. 



But these stylish turnouts form only a part of the 
spectacle in the Park driveways, though they form, 
perhaps, the larger part. Bicyclers weave their dan- 
gerous and devious way everywhere through the 
roads, and seem to be forbidden the briddle-paths, 
where from point to point you catch a glimpse of the 
riders. There are boys and girls in village carts, the 



GLIMPSES OF CENTRAL PARK. 241 

happiest of all the people you see ; and there are cheap- 
looking buggies, like those you meet in the country, 
with each a young man and young girl in them, 
as if they had come in from some remote suburb ; 
turnouts shabbier yet, with poor old horses, poke about 
with some elderly pair, like a farmer and his wife. 
There are family carryalls, with friendly-looking fam- 
ilies, old and young, getting the good of the Park 
together in a long, leisurely jog ; and open buggies 
with yellow wheels and raffish men in them behind 
their widespread trotters; or with some sharp-faced 
young fellow getting all the speed out of a lively span 
that the mounted policemen, stationed at intervals 
along the driveways, will allow. The finer vehicles 
are of all types, patterned like everything else that is 
fine in America, upon something fine in Europe ; but 
just now a very high-backed phaeton appears to be 
most in favor ; and in fact I get a great deal of pleas- 
ure out of these myself, as I do not have to sit stiffly 
up in them. They make me think somehow of those 
eighteenth-century English novels, of the times when 
young ladies like Evelina drove out in phaetons, and 
were the passionate pursuit of Lord Orvilles and Sir 
Clement Willoughbys. 

How far do the New Yorkers publicly carry their 

JT 



242 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

travesty of the European aristocratic life ? I should 
say, from what I have seen of the driving in the Park, 
it does not err on the side of excess. The equipages, 
when they are fine, are rather simple ; and the liveries 
are such as express a proprietary grandeur in coat-but- 
tons, silver ot gilt, and in a darker or lighter drab of 
the cloth the servants wear ; they are often in brown 
or dark green. Now and then you see the tightly 
cased legs and top-boots and cockaded hat of a groom, 
but this is oftenest on a four-in-hand coach, or the 
rumble of a tandem cart; the soul of the free-born 
republican is rarely bowed before it on the box of a 
family carriage. I have seen nothing like an attempt 
at family colors in the trappings of the coachman and 
horses. 

I should say that the imitation was quite within the 
bounds of good taste. The bad taste is in the wish 
to imitate Europe at all ; but with the abundance of 
money, the imitation is simply inevitable. There is 
no American life for wealth ; there is no native for- 
mula for the expression of social superiority ; because 
America means equality if it means anything, in the 
last analysis. But in all this show on the Park drive- 
ways, you get no effect so vivid as the effect of 
sterility in that liberty without equality which seems 



GLIMPSES OF CENTRAL PARK. 243 

to satisfy us Americans. A man may come into 
the Park witli any sort of vehicle, so that it is not for 
the carriage of merchandise, and he is free to spoil 
what might be a fine efiect with the intrusion of what- 
ever squalor of turnout he will. He has as much right 
there as any one, but the right to be shabby in the 
presence of people who are fine is not one that I should 
envy him. I do not think that he can be comfortable 
in it, for the superiority around him puts him to 
shame, as it puts the poor man to shame at every turn 
in life, though some people, with an impudence that 
is pitiable, will tell you that it does not put him 
to shame ; that he feels himself as good as any one. 
We are always talking about human nature and what 
it is, and what it is not ; but we try in our blind wor- 
ship of inequality to refuse the first and simplest 
knowledge of human nature, which testifies of itself 
in every throb of our own hearts, as we try even to 
refuse a knowledge of the Divine nature, and attribute 
to the Father of all a design in the injustice we have 
ourselves created. 

To me the lesson of Central Park is that where it is 
used in the spirit of fraternity and equality, the pleas- 
ure in, it is pure and fine, and that its frequenters have 
for the moment a hint of the beauty which might be 



244 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

perpetually in their lives ; but wliere it is invaded by 
the motives of the strife that raves all round it in the 
city outside, its joys are fouled with contempt and 
envy, the worst passions that tear the human heart. 
Ninety-nine Americans out of a hundred, have never 
seen a man in livery ; they have never dreamed of such 
a display as this in the Park. Yet with our conditions, 
I fear that at sight of it ninety-nine Americans out 
of every hundred would lust for their turn of the 
wheel, their throw of the dice, so that they might suc- 
ceed to a place in it, and flaunt their luxury in the 
face of poverty, and abash humility with their pride. 



NEW YORK STREETS. 

If the reader will look at a plan of New York, he 
will see that Central Park is really in the centre of the 
place, if a thing which has length only, or is so nearly 
without breadth or thickness, can be said to have a 
centre. South of the Park, the whole island is dense 
with life and business ; it is pretty solidly built up on 
either side ; but to the northward the blocks of houses 
are no longer of a compact succession ; they struggle 
up, at irregular intervals, from open fields, and sink 
again, on the streets pushed beyond them into the 
simple country, where even a suburban character is 
lost. It can only be a few years, at most, before all 
the empty spaces will be occupied, and the town, such 
as it is, and such as it seems to have been ever since 
the colonial period, will have anchored itself fast in 
the rock that underlies the larger half of it, and im- 
parted its peculiar effect to every street — an effect of 
arrogant untidiness, of superficial and formal gentility, 
of immediate neglect and overuse. 



246 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPBBIENCBS. 

I. 

You will see more of the neglect and overuse in tlie 
avenues which penetrate the city's mass from north to 
south, and more of the superficial and formal gentility 
in the streets that cross these avenues from east to 
west ; but the arrogant untidiness you will find nearly 
everywhere, except in some of the newest quarters 
westward from the Park, and still farther uptown. 
These are really very clean ; but they have a bare look, 
as if they were not yet inhabited, and, in fact, many 
of the houses are still empty. Lower down, the streets 
are often as shabby and as squalid as the avenues that 
run parallel with the river-sides ; and at least two of 
the avenues are as decent as the decentest cross-streets. 

Of late, a good many streets and several avenues 
have been asphalted, and the din of wheels on the 
rough pavement no longer torments the ear so cruelly ; 
but there is still the sharp clatter of the horses' 
shoes everywhere ; and their pulverized manure, which 
forms so great a part of the city's dust, and is con- 
stantly taken into people's stomachs and lungs, seems 
to blow more freely about on the asphalt than on the 
old-fashioned pavements. A few years ago scraps of 
paper, straw, fruit-peel, and all manner of minor waste 
and rubbish, littered all the thoroughfares ; under a 



NEW YORK STREETS. 247 

reform administration this has been amended ; but no 
one knows bow long a reform will last in New York. 
When I leave Central Park, where I like best to 
walk, I usually take one of the avenues southward, and 
then turn eastward or westward on one of the cross- 
streets whose perspective appeals to my curiosity, and 
stroll through it to one of the rivers. The avenues 
are fifteen or sixteen in number, and they stretch, some 
farther than others, up and down the island, but most 
of them end in the old town, where its irregularity be- 
gins, at the south, and several are interrupted by the 
different parks at the north. Together with the streets 
that intersect them between the old town and Central 
Park, they form one of the most characteristic parts 
of modern New York. Like the streets, they are num- 
bered, rather than named, from a want of imagination, 
or from a preference of mere convenience to the poetry 
and associations that cluster about a name, and can 
never cling to a number, or from a business impatience 
to be quickly done with the matter. This must rather 
defeat itself, however, when a hurried man undertakes 
to tell you that he lives at three hundred and seventy- 
five on One Hundred and Fifty-seventh street. Tow- 
ard the rivers the avenues grow shabbier and shabbier, 
though this statement must be qualified, like all gen- 



248 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

eral statements. Seventh Avenue, on the west, is 
pleasanter than Sixth Avenue ; and Second Avenue, on 
the east, is more agreeable than Third Avenue. In 
fact, the other afternoon, as I strayed over to the East 
River, I found several blocks of Avenue A, which runs 
nearest it, very quiet, built up with comfortable dwell- 
ings, and even clean, as cleanliness is understood in 
New York. 

But it is Fifth Avenue which divides the city length- 
wise nearest the middle, and it is this avenue which 
afiords the norm of style and comfort to the other 
avenues on either hand, and to all the streets that in- 
tersect it. Madison Avenue is its rival, and has suf- 
fered less from the invasion of shops and hotels, but a 
long stretch of Fifth Avenud is still the most aristo- 
cratic quarter of the city, and is upon the whole its 
finest thoroughfare. I do not think any New York 
street fine ; but, generally, Fifth Avenue and the cross- 
streets in its better part have a certain regularity in 
their mansions of brownstone, which give something 
of the pleasure one gets from symmetry. They are at 
least not so chaotic as they might be ; though they 
always suggest money more than taste, I cannot at 
certain moments, and under the favor of an evening 
sky, deny them a sort of unlovely and forbidding 



NEW YORK STREETS. 249 

beauty. There ;are not many of these cross-streets 
which have remained intact from the business of the 
other avenues. They have always a drinking-saloon or 
a provision-store or an apothecary's shop at the corners 
where they intersect ; the modistes find lodgment in 
them almost before the residents are aware. Beyond 
Sixth Avenue, or Seventh at farthest, on the west, and 
Fourth Avenue or Lexington, on the east, they lose 
their genteel character ; their dwellings degenerate into 
apartment-houses, and then into tenement-houses of 
lower and lower grade till the rude traffic and the 
offensive industries of the river shores are reached. 

But once more I must hedge, for sometimes a street 
is respectable almost to the water on one side or the 
other ; and there are whole neighborhoods of pleasant 
dwellings far down-town, which seem to have been 
forgotten by the enterprise of business, or neglected 
by its caprice, and to have escaped for a time at least 
the contagion of poverty. Business and poverty are 
everywhere slowly or swiftly eating their way into the 
haunts of respectability, and destroying its pleasant 
homes. They already have the whole of the old town 
to themselves. In large spaces of it no one dwells 
but the janitors with their families, who keep the 
sky-scraping edifices where business frets the time 



250 IMPKBSSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

away ; and by night in the streets where myriads throng 
by day, no one walks but the outcast and the watch. 

Many of these business streets are the handsomest 
in the city, with a good sky line, and an architectural 
ideal too good for the uses of commerce. This is 
often realized in antipathetic iron, but often there is 
good honest work in stone, and an effect better than 
the best of Fifth Avenue. But this is stupid and 
wasteful ; it is for the pleasure of no one's taste or 
sense ; the business men who traffic in these edifices 
have no time for their beauty, or no perception of it ; 
the porters and truckmen and expressmen, who toil 
and moil in these thoroughfares, have no use for the 
grandeur that catches the eye of a chance passer. 

Other spaces are abandoned to the poverty which 
festers in the squalid houses and swarms day and night 
in the squalid streets ; but business presses closer and 
harder upon the refuges of its foster-child, not to say 
its offspring, and it is only a question of time before 
it shall wholly possess them. It is only a question of 
time before all the comfortable quarters of the city, 
northward from the old town to the Park, shall be in- 
vaded, and the people driven to the streets building 
up on the west and east of it for a little longer 
sojourn. Where their last stay shall be. Heaven 



NEW YOKK STREETS. 251 

knows ; perhaps they will be forced into the country. 
In this sort of invasion, however, it is poverty that 
seems mostly to come first, and it is business that fol- 
lows and holds the conquest, though this is far from 
being always the case. Whether it is so or not, how- 
ever, poverty is certain at some time to impart its 
taint ; for it is perpetual here, from generation to gen- 
eration, like death itself. In our conditions, poverty 
is incurable ; the very hope of cure is laughed to scorn 
by those who cling the closest to these conditions ; it 
may be better at one time, and worse at another ; but 
it must always be, somehow, till time shall be no more. 
It is from everlasting to everlasting. 

11. 

"When I come home from these walks of mine, I 
have a vision of the wretched quarters through which 
I have passed, as blotches of disease upon the civic 
body, as loathsome sores, destined to eat deeper and 
deeper into it ; and I am haunted by this sense of 
them, until I plunge deep into the Park, and wash my 
consciousness clean of it all for a while. But when I 
am actually in these leprous spots, I become hardened, 
for the moment, to the deeply underlying fact of hu- 
man discomfort. I feel their picturesqueness, with a 



252 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPEKIENCES. 

callous indifference to that ruin, or that defect, which 
must so largely constitute the charm of the picturesque, 
A street of tenement-houses is always more picturesque 
than a street of brownstone residences, which the same 
thoroughfare usually is before it slopes to either river. 
The fronts of the edifices are decorated with the iron 
balconies and ladders of the fire-escapes, and have in 
the perspective a false air of gayety, which is traves- 
tied in their rear by the lines thickly woven from the 
windows to the tall poles set between the backs of 
the houses, and fluttering with drying clothes as with 
banners. 

The sidewalks swarm with children, and the air 
rings with their clamor, as they fly back and forth at 
play ; on the thresholds, the mothers sit nursing their 
babes, and the old women gossip together ; young girls 
lean from the casements, alow and aloft, or flirt from 
the doorways Avith the hucksters who leave their carts 
in the street, while they come forward with some bar- 
gain in fruit or vegetables, and then resume their leis- 
urely progress and their jarring cries. The place has 
all the attraction of close neighborhood, which the 
poor love, and which affords them for nothing the 
spectacle of the human drama, with themselves for act- 
ors. In a picture it would be most pleasingly effective, 



NEW YORK STREETS. 253 

for tlien you could be in it, and yet have the distance 
on it "whicL. it needs. But to be in it, and not have 
the distance, is to inhale the stenches of the neglected 
street, and to catch that yet fouler and dreadfuller 
poverty-smell which breathes from the open doorways. 
It is to see the children quarrelling in their games, and 
beating each other in the face, and rolling each other 
in the gutter, lite the little savage outlaws they are. 
It is to see the work-worn look of the mothers, the 
squalor of the babes, the haggish ugliness of the old 
women, the slovenly frowziness of the young girls. 
All this makes you hasten your pace down to the river, 
where the tall buildings break and dwindle into stables 
and shanties of wood, and finally end in the piers, 
commanding the whole stretch of the mighty water- 
way with its shipping, and the wooded heights of its 
western bank. 

I am supposing you to have walked down a street 
of tenement-houses to the North river, as the New- 
Yorkers call the Hudson ; and I wish I could give 
some notion of the beauty and majesty of the stream, 
some sense of the mean and ignoble efiect of the city's 
invasion of the hither shore. The ugliness is, indeed, 
only worse in degree, but not in kind, than that of all 
city water-fronts. Instead of pleasant homes, with 



254 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

green lawns and orchards sloping to the brink, huge 
factories and foundries, lumber yards, breweries, 
slaughter-houses, and warehouses, abruptly interspersed 
with stables and hovels and drinking-saloons, disfigure 
the shore, and in the nearest avenue the freight trains 
come and go on lines of railroads, in all the middle, 
portion of New York. South of it, in the business 
section, the poverty section, the river region is a mere 
chaos of industrial and commercial strife and pauper 
wretchedness. North of it there are gardened drive- 
ways following the shore ; and even at many points 
between, when you finally reach the river, there is a 
kind of peace, or at least a truce to the frantic activi- 
ties of business. To be sure, the heavy trucks grind 
up and down the long piers, but on either side the 
docks are full of leisurely canal-boats, and if you could 
come with me in the late afternoon, you would see the 
smoke curling upward from their cabin roofs, as from 
the chimneys of so many rustic cottages, and smell 
the evening meal cooking within, while the canal-wives 
lounged at the gangway hatches for a breath of the 
sunset air, and the boatmen smoked on the gunwales 
or indolently plied the long sweeps of their pumps. 
All the hurry and turmoil of the city is lost among 
these people, whose clumsy craft recall the grassy in- 



NEW YOKK STREETS. 255 

land levels remote from the metropolis, and the slow 
movement of life in tlie quiet country v?ays. Some of 
the mothers from the tenement-houses stroll down on 
the piers with their babies in their arms, and watch 
their men-kind, of all ages, fishing along the sides of 
the dock, or casting their lines far out into the current 
at the end. They do not seem to catch many fish, 
and never large ones, but they silently enjoy the sport, 
which they probably find leisure for in the general 
want of work in these hard times ; if they swear a lit- 
tle at their luck, nov/ and then, it is, perhaps, no more 
than their luck deserves. Some do not even fish, but 
sit with their legs dangling over the water, and watch 
the swift tugs, or the lagging sloops that pass, with 
now and then a larger sail, or a towering passenger 
steamboat. Far down the stream they can see the 
forests of masts, fringing either shore, and following 
the point of the island round and up into the great 
channel called the East River. These vessels seem as 
multitudinous as the houses that spread everywhere 
from them over the shore farther than the eye can 
reach. They bring the commerce of the world to this 
mighty city, which, with all its riches, is the parent 
of such misery, and with all Its traflac abounds in idle 
men who cannot find work. The ships look happy 



256 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

and free, in the stream, but they are of the overworked 
world, too, as well as the houses ; and let them spread 
their wings ever so widely, they still bear with them 
the sorrows of the poor. 

III. 

The other evening I walked over to the East River 
through one of the tenement streets, and I reached the 
waterside just as the soft night was beginning to fall 
in all its autumnal beauty. The afterglow died from 
the river, while I hung upon a parapet over a gulf ra- 
vined out of the bank for a street, and experienced 
that artistic delight which cultivated people are often 
proud of feeling, in the aspect of the long prison isl- 
and which breaks the expanse of the channel. I knew 
the buildings on it were prisons, and that the men and 
women in them, bad before, could only come out of 
them worse than before, and doomed to a life of out- 
lawry and of crime. I was aware that they were each 
an image of that loveless and hopeless perdition which 
men once imagined that God had prepared for the 
souls of the damned, but I could not see the barred 
windows of those hells in the waning light. I could 
only see the trees along their walks ; their dim lawns 
and gardens, and the castellated forms of the prisons ; 



NEW YORK STREETS. 257 

and the ajstlietio sense, wliicli is careful to keep itself 
pure from pity, was tickled with an agreeable impres- 
sion of something old and fair. The dusk thickened, 
and the vast steamboats which ply between the city and 
the New England ports on Long Island Sound, and 
daily convey whole populations of passengers between 
New York and Boston, began to sweep by silently, 
swiftly, luminous masses on the black water. Their 
lights aloft at bow and stern, floated with them like 
lambent planets ; the lights of lesser craft dipped by, 
and came and went in the distance ; the lamps of the 
nearer and farther shores twinkled into sight, and a 
peace that ignored all the misery of it, fell upon the 

scene. 

IV. 

The greatest problem of this metropolis is not how 
best to be in this place or that, but how fastest to go 
from one to the other, and the New-Yorkers have 
made guesses at the riddle, bad and worse, on each of 
the avenues, which, in their character of mere road- 
ways, look as if the different car-tracks had been in 
them first, and the buildings, high and low, had 
chanced along their sides afterward. This is not the 
fact, of course, and it is not so much the effect on 
Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue, and Lexington 
Q 



258 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

Avenue, which are streets of dwellings, solidly built 
up, like the cross streets. But it is undoubtedly the 
effect on all the other avenues, in great part of their 
extent. They vary but little in appearance otherwise, 
from east to west, except so far as the elevated railroads 
disfigure them, if thoroughfares so shabby and re- 
pulsive as they mostly are, can be said to "^ disfigured, 
and not beautified by whatever can be done to hide 
any part of their ugliness. Where this is left to make 
its full impression upon the spectators, there are lines 
of horse-cars perpetually jingling up and down, except 
on Fifth Avenue, where they have stages, as the New- 
Yorkers call the unwieldy and unsightly vehicles that 
ply there, and Lexington Avenue, where they have 
the cable cars. But the horse-cars run even under the 
elevated tracks, and no experience of noise can enable 
you to conceive of the furious din that bursts upon 
the sense, when at some corner two cars encounter on 
the parallel tracks below, while two trains roar and 
shriek and hiss on the rails overhead, and a turmoil 
of rattling express wagons, heavy drays and trucks, 
and carts, hacks, carriages, and huge vans rolls itself 
between and beneath the prime agents of the uproar. 
The noise is not only deafening, it is bewildering ; you 
cannot know which side the danger threatens most, 



NEW YORK STREETS. 259 

and you literally take your life in your hand when you 
cross in the midst of it. Broadway, which traverses 
the district I am thinking of, in a diagonal line till it 
loses its distinctive character beyond the Park, is the 
course of the cable cars running with a silent speed that 
is more dangerous even than the tumultuous rush on the 
avenues. !N"ow and then the apparatus for gripping the 
chain will not release it, and then the car rushes wildly 
over the track, running amuck through everything in 
its way, and spreading terror on every hand. When 
under control the long saloons advance swiftly, from 
either direction, at intervals of half a minute, with a 
monotonous alarum of their gongs, and the foot-pas- 
senger has to look well to his way if he ventures across 
the track, lest in avoiding one car another roll him 
under its wheels. 

Apparently, the danger is guarded as well as it can 
be, and it has simply to be taken into the account of 
life in New York, for it cannot be abated, and no one 
is to be blamed for what is the fault of every one. It 
is true that there ought not, perhaps, to be any track 
in such a thoroughfare, but it would be hard to prove 
that people could get on without it, as they did before 
the theft of the street for the original horse-car track. 
Perhaps it was not a theft ; but at all events, and at 



260 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

the best, tlie street was given away by the city to an 
adventurer who wished to lay the tracks in it for his 
private gain, and none of the property owners along 
the line could help themselves. There is nothing that 
Americans hold so dear, or count so sacred, as private 
property ; life and limb are cheap in comparison ; but 
private enterprise is allowed to violate the rights of 
private property, from time to time here, in the most 
dramatic way. 

The street-car company which took possession of 
Broadway never paid the abutters anything, I believe ; 
and the elevated railroad companies are still resisting 
payment of damages on the four avenues which they 
occupied for their way up and down the city without 
offering compensation to the property owners along 
their route. If the community had built these roads, 
it would have indemnified every one, for the commu- 
nity is always just when it is the expression of the 
common honesty ; and if it is ever unjust, it is because 
the uncommon dishonesty has contrived to corrupt it. 

The elevated roads and the cable road had no right 
to be, on the terms that the New-Yorkers have them, 
but they are by far the best means of transit in the 
city, and I must say that, if they were not abuses, 
they would offer great comfort and great facility to the 



i 



NEW YORK STREETS. 261 

public. This is especially true of the elevated roads, 
which, when you can put their moral offense out of your 
mind, are always delightful in their ease and airy swift- 
ness. You fly smoothly along between the second and 
third story windows of the houses, which are shops 
below and dwellings above, on the avenues. The sta- 
tions, though they have the prevailing effect of over- 
use, and look dirty and unkempt, are rather pretty in 
themselves ; and you reach them, at frequent intervals, 
by flights of not ungraceful iron steps. The elevated 
roads are always picturesque, with here and there a 
sweeping curve that might almost be called beautiful. 
They darken the avenues, of course, and fill them 
with an abominable uproar. Yet traffic goes on under- 
neath, and life goes on alongside and overhead, and 
the city has adjusted itself to them, as a man adjusts 
himself to a chronic disease. I do not know whether 
they add to the foulness of the streets they pass 
through or not ; I hardly think they do. The mud 
lies longer, after a rain, in the interminable tunnels 
which they form over the horse-car tracks in the mid- 
dle of the avenues, and which you can look through 
for miles ; but the mud does not blow into your nose 
and mouth as the dust does, and that is, so far, a 
positive advantage. A negative advantage, which I 



262 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

have hinted, is that they hide so much of the street 
from sight, and keep you from seeing all its shabbi- 
ness, pitilessly open to the eye in the avenues which 
have only horse-car tracks in them. In fact, now that 
the elevated railroads are built, and the wrong they 
have done to persons is mainly past recall, perhaps the 
worst that can be said of them is that they do not 
serve their purpose. Of course, in our conditions, 
where ten men are always doing the work of one man 
in rivalry with each other, the passage of people to 
and from business is enormous : the passage of men to 
get money and the passage of women to spend it ; and 
at the hours of the morning and the afternoon when 
the volume of travel is the greatest, the trains of the 
elevated roads offer a spectacle that is really incredible. 
Every seat in them is taken, and every foot of space 
in the aisles between the seats is held by people stand- 
ing, and swaying miserably to and fro by the leather 
straps danglmg from the roofs. Men and women are 
indecently crushed together, without regard for that 
personal dignity which we seem to know nothing of 
and care nothing for. The multitude overflows from 
the car, at either end, and the passengers are as tight- 
ly wedged on the platform without as they are within. 
The long trains follow each other at intervals of two 



NEW YOUK STREETS. 263 

or three minutes, and at each station they make a stop 
of but a few seconds, when those who wish to alight 
fight their way through the struggling mass. Those 
who wish to mount fight their way into the car or on 
to the platform, where the guard slams an iron gate 
against the stomachs and in the faces of those arriving 
too late. Sometimes horrible accidents happen; a 
man clinging to the outside of the gate has the life 
crushed out of his body against the posts of the sta- 
tion as the train pulls out. But in this land, where 
people have such a dread of civic collectivism of any 
kind, lest individuality should suffer, the individual is 
practically nothing in the regard of the corporate col- 
lectivities which abound. 

V. 

It is not only the corporations which outrage per- 
sonal rights ; where there is a question of interest, 
there seems to be no question of rights between 
individuals. They prey upon one another and seize 
advantages by force and by fraud in too many ways 
for me to hope to make the whole situation evident. 
The avenues to the eastward and westward have not 
grown up solidly and continuously in obedience to any 
law of order, or in pursuance of any meditated design. 



264 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

They liave been pushed along given lines, in frag- 
ments, as builders saw their interest in offering buyers 
a house or a row of houses, or as they could glut or 
trick the greed of land-owners clinging to their land, 
and counting upon some need of it, in the hope of 
extorting an unearned profit from it. In one place 
you will see a vast and lofty edifice, of brick or stone, 
and on each side of it or in front of it a structure one 
fourth as high, or a row of scurvy hovels, left there 
till a purchaser comes, not to pay the honest worth of 
the land for it, but to yield the price the owner wants. 
In other places you see long stretches of high board 
fence, shutting in vacant lots, often the best lots on 
the street, which the landlord holds for the rise des- 
tined to accrue to him from the building all round and 
beyond his property. In the meantime he pays a low 
tax on his land compared with the tax which the im- 
proved property pays, and gets some meager return 
for the use of his fence by the Italian fruiterers who 
build their stalls into it, and by the bill-posters who 
cover it with a medley of theatrical announcements, 
picturing the scenes of the different plays and the per- 
sons of the players. There are many things which 
unite to render the avenues unseemly and unsightly, 
such as the apparently desperate tastelessness and the 



NEW YORK STREETS. 265 

apparently instinctive uncleanliness of tLe New-York- 
ers. But as I stand at some point commanding a long 
stretch of one of their tiresome perspectives, which is 
architecturally like nothing so much as a horse's jaw- 
bone, with the teeth broken or dislodged at intervals, 
I can blame nothing so much for the hideous effect as 
the rapacity of the land-owner holding on for a rise, 
as it is called. It is he who most spoils the sky-line, 
and keeps the street, mean and poor at the best in de- 
sign, a defeated purpose, and a chaos come again. 

Even when the owners begin to build, to improve 
their real estate, as the phrase is, it is without regard 
to the rights of their neighbors, or the feelings or 
tastes of the public, so far as the public may be sup- 
posed to have any. This is not true of the shabbier 
avenues alone, but of the finest, and of all the streets. 
If you will look, for instance, at the street facing the 
southern limit of the Park, you will get some notion 
of what I mean, and I hope you will be willing to suf- 
fer by a little study of it. At the western end you 
will see a vacant lot, with its high board fence covered 
with painted signs, then a tall mass of apartment 
houses ; then a stretch of ordinary New York dwellings 
of the old commonplace brownstone sort; then a sta- 
ble, and a wooden liquor saloon at the corner. Across 



266 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

the next avenue there rises far aloof the compact bulk 
of a series of apartment houses, which in color and 
design are the pleasantest in the city, and are so far 
worthy of their site. Beyond them to the eastward 
the buildings decline and fall, till they sink into an- 
other two-story drinking-shop on the corner of another 
avenue, where you will see the terminus of one of the 
elevated roads. Beyond this avenue is the fence of a 
large vacant lot, covered, as usual, with theatrical post- 
ers, and then there surges skyward another series of 
apartment houses. The highest of these is nearly 
fifty feet higher than its nearest neighbors, which sink 
again, till you suddenly drop from their nondescript 
monotony to the gothic fa§ade of a house of a wholly 
different color, in its pale sandstone, from the red of 
their brick fronts. 

A vacant lot yawns here again, with a flare of the- 
atrical posters on its fence, and beyond this, on the 
corner, is a huge hotel, the most agreeable of the three 
that tower above the fine Bqiiare at the gate of the 
Park. With our silly American weakness for some- 
thing foreign, this square is called the Plaza; I believe 
it is not at all like a Spanish plaza, but the name is its 
least offense. An irregular space in the centre is 
planted with trees, in whose shade the broken-kneed 



NEW YORK STREETS. 267 

hacks of tlie public carriages droop their unhappy 
heads, without the spirit to bite the flies that trouble 
their dreams ; and below this you get a glimpse of the 
conventional cross-street terminating the Plaza. At 
the eastern corner of the avenue is a costly new 
apartment house of a modified gothic style, and then 
you come to the second of the great hotels which give 
the Plaza such character as it has. It is of a light- 
colored stone, and it towers far above the first, which 
is of brick. It is thirteen stories high, and it stops 
abruptly in a fiat roof. On the next corner north is 
another hotel, which rises six or seven stories higher 
yet, and terminates in a sort of mansard, topping a 
romanesque cliff of yellow brick and red sandstone. I 
seek a term for the architectural order, but it may not 
be the right one. There is no term for the disorder 
of what succeeds. From the summit of this enormous 
acclivity there is a precipitous fall of twelve stories to 
the roof of the next edifice, which is a grocery; and 
then to the florist's and photographer's next is another 
descent of three stories ; on the corner is a drinking- 
saloon, one story in height, with a brick front and a 
wooden side. I will not ask you to go farther with 
me ; the avenue continues northward and southward 
in a delirium of lines and colors, a savage anarchy of 



268 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

shapes, whicli I should think the general experience of 
the Fair City at Chicago would now render perceptible 
even to the dullest sense. 

VI. 

There are other points on Fifth Avenue nearly ^s 
bad as this, but not quite, and there are long stretches 
of it, which, if dull, have at least a handsome uniform- 
ity. I have said already that it is still, upon the whole, 
the best of the avenues, in the sense of being the 
abode of the best — that is the richest — people ; we 
Americans habitually use best in this sense. Madison 
Avenue stretches northwest farther than the eye can 
reach, an interminable perspective of brownstone 
dwellings, as yet little invaded by business. Lexing- 
ton Avenue is of the same character, but of a humbler 
sort. On Second Avenue, down town, there are large 
old mansions of the time when Fifth Avenue was still 
the home of the parvenus ; and at different points on 
such other avenues as are spared by the elevated roads 
there are blocks of decent and comfortable dwellings ; 
but for the most part they are wholly given up to 
shops. Of course, these reiterate with the insane 
wastefulness of our system the same business, the 
sanle enterprise, a thousand times. 



NEW YORK STREETS. 269 

One hears a good deal about the vast emporiurns 
which are gathering the retail trade into themselves, 
and devastating the minor commerce, but there are 
perhaps a score of these at most, in New York ; and 
on the shabbier avenues and cross-streets there are at 
least a hundred miles of little shops, where an immense 
population of little dealers levy tribute on the public 
through the profit they live by. Until you actually 
see this, you can hardly conceive of such a multitude 
of people taken away from productive labor and solely 
devoted to marketing the things made- by people who 
are overworked in making them. 

Yet I prefer the smaller shops, where I can enter 
into some human relation with the merchant, if it is 
only for the moment. I have already tried to give 
some notion of the multitude of these ; and I must say 
now that they add much in their infinite number and 
variety to such effect of gayety as the city has. T^ey 
are especially attractive at night, when their brilliant 
lamps, with the shadows they cast, unite to an effect 
of gayety which the day will not allow. 

The great stores contribute nothing to this, for they 
all close at six o'clock in the evening. On the other 
hand, they do not mar such poor beauty as the place 
has with the superfluity of signs that the minor traffic 



270 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

renders itself so offensive with. One sign, ratlier 
simple and unostentatious, suffices for a large store ; a 
little store will want half a dozen, and will have them 
painted and hung all over its fagade, and stood about 
in front of it as obtrusively as the police will permit. 
The effect is bizarre and grotesque beyond expression. 
If one thing in the business streets makes New York 
more hideous than another it is the signs, with their 
discordant colors, their infinite variety of tasteless 
shapes. If by chance there is any architectural beauty 
in a business edifice, it is spoiled, insulted, outraged 
by these huckstering appeals; while the prevailing 
unsightliness is emphasized and heightened by them. 
A vast, hulking, bare brick wall, rising six or seven 
stories above the neighboring buildings, one would 
think bad enough in all conscience : how, then, shall I 
give any notion of the horror it becomes when its un- 
lovely space is blocked out in a ground of white with 
a sign painted on it in black letters ten feet high ? 

The signs that deface the chief of our cities seem 
trying to shout and shriek each other down, wherever 
one turns ; they deface the fronts and sides and tops 
of the edifices ; in all the approaches to the metropolis 
they stretch on long extents of fencing in the vacant 
suburban lands, and cover the roofs and sides of the 



NEW YORK STREETS. 271 

barns. The darkness does not shield you from them, 
and by night the very sky is starred with the electric 
bulbs that spell out, on the roofs of the lofty build- 
ings the frantic announcement of this or that business 
enterprise. 

The strangest part of all this is, no one finds it of- 
fensive, or at least no one says that it is offensive. It 
is, indeed, a necessary phase of the economic warfare 
in which our people live, for the most as unconsciously 
as people lived in feudal cities, while the nobles fought 
out their private quarrels in the midst of them. No 
one dares relax his vigilance or his activity in the com- 
mercial strife, and in the absence of any public opinion, 
or any public sentiment concerning them, it seems as 
if the signs might eventually hide the city. That 
would not be so bad if something could then be done 
to hide the signs. 

VIII. 

Nothing seems so characteristic of this city, after 
its architectural shapelessness, as the eating and drink- 
ing constantly going on in the restaurants and hotels, 
of every quality, and the innumerable saloons. There 
may not be really more of these in New York, in pro- 
portion to the population, than in other great cities. 



272 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

but apparently there are more ; for in tHs, as in all 
her other characteristics, New York is very open ; her 
virtues and her vices, her luxury and her misery, are 
in plain sight ; and a famishing man must suffer pecul- 
iarly here from the spectacle of people everywhere at 
sumptuous tables. Many of the finest hotels, if not 
most of them, have their dining-rooms on the level of 
the street, and the windows, whether curtained or un- 
curtained, reveal the continual riot within. I confess 
that the effect upon some hungry passer is always 
present to my imagination ; but the New-Yorkers are 
so used to the perpetual encounter of famine and of 
surfeit that they do not seem to mind it. 

There is scarcely a block on any of the poorer ave- 
nues which has not its liquor store, and generally there 
are two ; wherever a street crosses them there is a sa- 
loon on at least one of the corners ; sometimes on two, 
sometimes on three, sometimes even on all four. I 
had the curiosity to count the saloons on Sixth Ave- 
nue, between the Park, and the point down town 
where the avenue properly ends. In a stretch of some 
two miles I counted ninety of them, besides the eating 
houses where you can buy drink with your meat; and 
this avenue is probably far less infested with the traf- 
fic than some others. 



,— " " ^MHI 



NEW YORK STREETS. 273 

You may therefore safely suppose tliat out of tlie 
hundred miles of shops, there are ten, or fifteen, or 
twenty miles of saloons. They have the bjst places 
on the avenues, and on the whole they make the hand- 
somest show. They all have a cheerful and inviting 
look, and if you step within, you find them cosy, quiet, 
and, for New York, clean. There are commonly tables 
set about in them, where their frequenters can take 
their beer or whiskey at their ease, and eat the free 
lunch which is often given in them; in a rear room 
you see a billiard-table. In fact, they iorm the poor 
man's club-houses, and if he might resort to them with 
his family, and be in the control of the State as to the 
amount he should spend and drink there, I could not 
think them without their rightful place in an economy 
which saps the vital forces of the laborer with over- 
work, or keeps him in a fever of hope or a fever of 
despair as to the chances of getting or not getting 
work when he has lost it. If you suggested this to 
the average American, however, he would be horror- 
struck. He would tell you that what you proposed 
was little better than anarchy ; that in a free country 
you must always leave private persons free to debauch 
men's souls and bodies with drink, and make money 
out of their ruin ; that anything else was contrary to 
R 



274 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

human nature, and an invasion of the sacred rights of 
the individual. Here in New York, this valuable prin- 
ciple is so scrupulously respected that the saloon con- 
trols the municipality, and the New- Yorkers think this 
is much better than for the municipality to control the 
saloon. It is from the saloon that their political 
bosses rise to power ; it is m the saloon that all the 
election frauds are planned and fostered ; and it would 
be infinitely comic, if it were not so pathetic, to read 
the solemn homilies on these abuses in the journals 
which hold by the good old American doctrine of pri- 
vate trade in drink as one of the bulwarks of the con- 
stitution. 

VIII. 

Without it, there would be far less poverty than 
there is, but poverty is a good old American institu- 
tion, too; there would inevitably be less inequality, 
but inequality is as dear to the American heart as lib- 
erty itself. In New York the inequality has that effect 
upon the architecture which I have tried to give some 
notion of ; but in fact it deforms life at every turn, and 
in nothing more than in the dress of the people, high 
and low. New York is, on the whole, without doubt, 
the best-dressed community in America, or at least 
there is a certain number of people here, more expen- 



NEW YORK STREETS. 275 

sively and scrupulously attired than you will find any- 
where else in the country. The rich copy the fashions 
set for them in Paris or in London, and then the less 
rich, and the still less rich, down to the poor, follow 
them as they can, until you arrive at the very poorest, 
who wear the cast-off and tattered fashions of former 
years, and masquerade in a burlesque of the fortunate 
that never fails to shock and grieve me. They must 
all somehow be clothed; the climate and the custom 
require it; but sometimes I think their nakedness 
would be less offensive ; and when I meet a wretched 
man, with his coat out at the elbows, or split up the 
back, in broken shoes, battered hat, and frayed trou- 
sers, or some old woman or young girl in a worn-out, 
second-hand gown and bonnet, tattered and threadbare 
and foul, I think that if I were a believer in it, I would 
uncover my head to them, and ask their forgiveness 
for the system that condemns some one always to such 
humiliation as theirs. 

We say such people are not humiliated, that they 
do not mind it, that they are used to it ; but if we 
ever look these people in the eye, and see the shrink- 
ing, averted glance of their shame and tortured pride, 
we must know that what we say is a cruel lie. At any 
rate, the presence of these outcasts must spoil the 



276 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

beauty of any dress near them, and there is always so 
much more penury than affluence that the sight of the 
crowd in the New York streets must give more pain 
than pleasure. The other day on Fifth Avenue it did 
not console me to meet a young and lovely girl, exquis- 
itely dressed in the last efEect of Paris, after I had just 
parted from a young fellow who had begged me to 
give him a little money to get something to eat, for he 
had been looking for work a week and had got noth- 
ing. I suppose I ought to have doubted his word, 
he was so decently clad, but I had a present vision 
of him in rags, and I gave to the frowzy tramp he 
must soon become. 

Of course, this social contrast was extreme, like 
some of those architectural contrasts I have been not- 
ing, but it was by no means exceptional, as those were 
not. In fact, I do not know but I may say that it 
was characteristic of the place, though you might say 
that the prevalent American slovenliness was also char- 
acteristic of the New York street crowds ; I mean the 
slovenliness of the men — the women, of whatever order 
they are, are always as much dandies as they can be. 
But most American men are too busy to look much 
after their dress, and when they are very well to do 
they care very little for it. You see few men dressed 



NEW YORK STREETS. 277 

in New York with the distinction of the better class 
of Londoners, and when you do meet them, they have 
the air of playing a part, as in fact they are : they are 
playing the part of men of leisure in a nation of men 
whose reality is constant work, whether they work for 
bread or whether they work for money, and who, when 
they are at work, outdo the world, but sink, when they 
are at leisure, into something third rate and fourth 
rate. The commonness of effect in the street crowds 
is not absent from Fifth Avenue or from Madison 
Avenue any more than it is from First Avenue or 
Tenth Avenue ; and the tide of wealth and fashion, that 
rolls up and down the better avenues in the splendid 
carriages, makes the shabbiness of the foot-passenger, 
when he is shabby, as he often is, the more apparent. 
On the far east side, and on the far west side, the 
horse-cars, which form the only means of transit, have 
got the dirt and grime of the streets and the dwellings 
on them and in them, and there is one tone of foulness 
in the passengers and the vehicles. I do not wish to 
speak other than tenderly of the poor, but it is useless 
to pretend that they are other than offensive in aspect, 
and I have to take my sympathy in both hands when 
I try to bestow it upon them. Neither they nor the 
quarter they live in has any palliating quaintness; and 



278 IMPRESSIONS AND ESPEKIENCES. 

the soul, starved of beauty, will seek in vain to feed 
itself with tlie husks of picturesqueness in their aspect. 

IX. 

As I have said before, the shabby avenues have a 
picturesqueness of their own, but it is a repulsive pict- 
uresqueness, as I have already suggested, except at a 
distance. There are some differences of level, on the 
avenues near the rivers, that give them an advantage 
of the more central avenues, and there is now and then 
a break of their line by the water, which is always 
good. I have noticed this particularly on the eastern 
side of the city, which is also the older part, and which 
has been less subject to the changes perpetually going 
on elsewhere, so that First Avenue has really a finer 
sky-line, in many parts, than most parts of Fifth Ave- 
nue. There are certain bits, as the artists say, in the 
old quarters of the town once forming Greenwich vil- 
lage, which, when I think of them, make me almost 
wish to take back what I have said of the absence even 
of quaintness in New York. If I recall the aspect of 
Mulberry Bend and Elizabeth street, on a mild after- 
noon, when their Italian denizens are all either on 
the pavement or have their heads poked out of the 
windows, I am still more in doubt of my own words. 



NEW YORK STREETS. 279 

But I am sure, at least, that there is no kindliness in 
the quaintness, such as you are said to find in Euro- 
pean cities. It has undergone the same sort of malign 
change here that has transformed the Italians from 
the friendly folk they are at home to the surly race 
they mostly show themselves here : shrewd for their 
advancement in the material things, which seem the 
only good things to the Americanized aliens of all 
races, and fierce for their full share of the political pot- 
tage. The Italians have a whole region of the city to 
themselves, and they might feel at home in it if the 
filthiness of their native environment could repatriate 
them. 

As you pass through these streets, there is much to 
appeal to your pity in the squalid aspect of the people 
and the place, but nothing to take your fancy; and 
perhaps this is best, for I think that there is nothing 
more infernal than the juggle that transmutes for the 
tenderest-hearted people the misery of their fellows 
into something comic or poetic. Only very rarely 
have I got any relief from the sheer distress which the 
prevalent poverty gives ; and perhaps the reader will 
not be able to understand how I could find this in the 
sight of some chickens going to roost on a row of carts 
drawn up by the street-side, near a little hovel where 



280 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES. 

some old people lived in a temporary respite from tlie 
building about tbem ; or from a cottage in outlying 
suburban fields, with a tar-roofed sbanty for a stable, 
and an old horse cropping the pasturage of the enclos- 
ure, with a brood of turkeys at his heels. 

But in JSTew York you come to be glad of anything 
that will suggest a sweeter and a gentler life than that 
which you mostly see. The life of the poor here 
seemed to me symbolized in a waste and ruined field 
that I came upon the other day in one of the westward 
avenues, which had once been the grounds about a 
pleasant home. Till I saw this I did not think any 
piece of our mother earth could have been made to look 
so brutal and desolate amidst the habitations of men. 
But every spear of grass had been torn from it; the 
hardened and barren soil was furrowed like a haggard 
face, and it was all strewn with clubs and stones, as if 
it had been a savage battleground. A few trees stood 
aloof from the borders next the streets, where some 
courses of an ancient stone wall rose in places above 
the pavement. I found the sight of it actually de- 
praving ; it made me feel ruffianly, and I mused upon 
it in helpless wonder as to the influence its ugliness 
must have had amidst the structural ugliness all about 
it, if some wretch had turned to it in hopes of respite. 



NEW YORK STREETS. 281 

But probably none ever does. Probably the people 
on tbe shabby streets and avenues are no more sensi- 
ble of their hideousness than the people in the finer 
streets and avenues are aware of their dulness or their 
frantic disproportion. I have never heard a New- 
Yorker speak of these things, and I have no doubt 
that if my words could come to the eyes of the aver- 
age New-Yorker he would be honestly surprised that 
any one should find his city so ugly as it is. As for 
that first lesson of civilization which my words impli- 
cate, a civic control of the private architecture of the 
place, he would shrink from it with about as much 
horror as from civic control of the liquor trade. If 
he did not he would still be unable to understand how 
the individual liberty that suffers a man to build offen- 
sively to his neighbor or to the public at large is not 
liberty, but is a barbarous tyranny, which puts an end 
instantly to beauty, and extinguishes the common and 
the personal rights of every one who lives near the 
offender or passes by his edifice. We Americans are 
yet so far lost in the dark ages as to suppose that 
there is freedom where the caprice of one citizen can 
interfere with the comfort or pleasure of the rest. 

THE END. 



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